No, Both Sides Aren't to Blame for the 'Super Committee' Failure

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@largo
How do you come to this conclusion, but all I hear from the gop sounds like hot air. Cut cut cut, but that isn't history, it isn't fact.
They want to cut the revenue source with out cutting spending where it needs it most.
Cut Military, and foreign aid, and invest in infrastructure. Stop with the trillion dollar war plane project that never gets off the ground.
Incumbent interests are actually lobbying for what will ultimately result in america falling into second tier status. Nearly there already.
Before you jump to blaming democrats, they didn't get us into wars costing huge (no they didn't stop it either) dollars.
I'm for cutting government not the saftey net that just happens to be run by it. Lets start by asking: How many federal police agencies do we need?
There is your 2 trillion in the next 10 years.

Autisticgramma of UT 1:32PM November 23, 2011

For starters, let's find a revenue source that pays in full for the Iraq War. Then, let's pay in full for the War in Afghanistan. Then, how about implementing the Simpson-Bowles recommendations for Medicare and Social Security?

Uncle Brice of AR 12:45PM November 23, 2011

I think that Schlesinger's bow tie is tied a little too tight.
First, this committee was charged with finding $1.2 Trillion dollars of spending cuts over a 10-year period. Let's see how many ways we can say it:
It had to figure out how to spend $8 trillion more, instead of $9 trillion more over the next 10 years.
It had to figure out how to cut 2.5 cents out of every dollar spent from now until 2021.
It had to figure out how to spend only $44.6 trillion dollars instead of $45.8 trillion over the next 10 years.
But Democrats couldn't abide by that. Instead, they were interested in how to hike taxes by that amount of money instead. The D's wanted little to nothing in terms of cuts.
I'm glad it failed. If we can get rid of enough Democrats before the country goes bankrupt, then we can begin this long hard journey out of insolvency.

Largo Lagg of SD 12:09PM November 23, 2011

The money is being spent on the Military Industrial Complex, they raised Defense / bogus war on terror spending from just under 300 billion a year in 2001, to 1+ trillion a year today. The Pentagon has a budget of like 740 billion a year now. That more than double when Bush came to office. When you add in the rest, like the wars, black projects, and a few other things thath's not on the Pentagons budget, it comes to 1+ trillion a year. I got that number from 3 different sources. The rest of the money is tied to the recession. Lotta people getting unemployment benefits. Tax cuts mean less revenue and more borrowing. Then there's the pork barrel projects. Those Tea Freshmen started porking it up as soon as taking office. Just Google (cost cutters, except when the spending is back home) read the first NYT article. The Dems don't lie to voters about their pork spending, they just do it. This is a 2 party problem. Look at Paul Ryan's budget after his cuts, he leaves us with debt of 23+ trillion dollars in 2021.

Mike M of SC 4:30AM November 23, 2011

The gop final plan was less than the $1.2 trillion required by law,therefore the gop failed miserably.
Some argue that spending is the problem. Duh!
Why are we spending? It's because we have a lot of unemployed who get benefits and don't pay any taxes. Then we have corporations that are making record profits and are not paying any taxes. Why not? Because of tax cuts.
The gop passed trillions of dollars of tax cuts (often called the Bush tax cuts). Then those tax cuts were extended. If they were to go away, our budget deficit would shrink considerably.
The gop is a dead party. Only complete fools think it can govern

zzpat of ND 2:53AM November 23, 2011

Gads, what an idiotic post for a pathetically partisan whackjob.
THE PROBLEM IS THE SPENDING, STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
According to the CBO federal spending was $2.729T in 2007 and $3.6T in 2011. That’s an increase of 32 percent in just five years.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/121xx/doc12130/04-15-AnalysisPresidentsBudget.pdf
According to their analysis, the federal budget will be $5.68 trillion in 2021. That’s an increase of 58 percent over 2011, and 108 percent over 2007.
You would think that it wouldn't be too hard to cut $1.2 trillion off of that number — thereby cutting 2021 spending from $5.68 to $4.48 trillion. Even $4.48 trillion in spending in 2021 would be an increase of 64 percent versus 2007 spending.
But that’s not what the deficit committee was charged with doing — it wasn’t charged with cutting $1.2 trillion from fiscal year 2021 spending. Instead, it had a far, far easier task. It needed only to cut spending by that amount over the entire decade from 2012 to 2021.
Across that whole decade, the CBO currently projects that the federal government will spend $45.77 trillion. The deficit committee was charged with trimming deficit spending by just $1.2 trillion, which could have been achieved by cutting that $45.77 trillion in spending by just 2.6 percent, or put another way, they only had to reduce the INCREASE in spending by about 12 percent!
WHAT THE HELL IS THE GOVERNMENT SPENDING ALL OF THIS INCREASE ON?
AND WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING ABOUT ACTUALLY DECREASING THE BUDGET?
Answers :
(1), no one knows.
(2), absolutely nothing.
Only the GOP members of the committee tried to compromise by a combination of both substantial tax raising and spending reduction - the Dems wouldn't budge from their position that of the $1.2T, $1T of it had to come from raising taxes.
But non of this would actually address the real underlying problem in Washington:
WE SPEND TOO DAMNED MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Schlessinger, if you weren't such a pathetic partisan hack, you'd be screaming at BOTH parties, rather than trying to assign blame to just one.
But that might require some clear thinking, wouldn't it?

junior of DC 7:14PM November 22, 2011

The Super Committee should have listened to the words of the great President John F Kennedy...
"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

Dana F of NJ 6:50PM November 22, 2011

WHY 'COMPROMISE' WITH THOSE WHO THINK TAX CUTS ROB THE GUB'MENT OF MONEY...
when in just a year we can kick more of those types out of the House and this time Senate, just like we did in 2010?
And probably kick the big community compromiser out of the Oval office as well.
All the dems and their pathetic shills like Scheisslinger pleading for 'compromise' are like car salesmen:
You do your research first and make the car salesman your best offer up front, say $25,000. Car salesman takes it into his sales manager's office. Comes back with an offer to sell at $27,000. You say thanks for his time, remind him that you gave him your best offer up front, and get up to leave. Car salesman then sez:
Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa; how about we 'compromise' -- $26,000???
And why should we compromise anyways with full-retail-price dems and republicans both supposedly trying to find a measly $100 billion in quasi spending cuts per year for the next ten when instead we can vote for Paul in the republican primary, who had no trouble finding ONE TRILLION worth of actual, REAL spending cuts that would take place in the first year of a Paul presidency?
Now that Obama's lame Plouffe-supplied re-electme strategy of blaming republicans for not 'compromising' has been sketched out in full for the next year, there's only one conclusion to draw:
Anita Dunn must have been the real messaging brains behind Axelrod, Plouffe, & Dunn back in '08.
And it's probably also true that once Obama got elected Plouffe and Axelrod old-boy-networked Dunn to the margins.
"Anita Dunn gives mixed account of how White House women fared"
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/06/news/la-pn-dunn-women-white-house-20111106
So now for 2012, more than half of us know Obama doesn't have the reality of the message behind him from 2008 -- and on top of that, Obama doesn't have the heavy-hitting messaging 'talent' of Dunn to obscure such.
And while Scheisslinger's heart-throbs Klein and Sargent note that democrats moved right and republicans moved further right, neither them nor Scheisslinger seem cognizant that all things federal are moving in Ron Paul's direction.
Paul has been moving both the full-retail-price democrats and republicans toward his positions since 2008. Just by being himself, an outstanding class act, and his continuing consistency of fiscally- and morally-prudent ideas.
The latest class act of Paul that has the full-retail-price dems and republicans dropping bricks was how polite and empathetic Paul was to OWS protestors that crashed a Paul event:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/68868.html
So enough with the four-year foreplay already: Ron Paul, 2012.

dom youngross of OH 6:20PM November 22, 2011

There comes a point when you "just say no" to a government that continues reckless spending even in the midst of one of the most severe recessions the country has ever known. Why increase taxes and just give them more money to waste ? *Maybe* it would be acceptable to "increase revenues" if the new taxes were all guaranteed to be used for deficit reduction instead of new spending. Heck, this congress doesn't even know the meaning of "cut". They think that a *smaller increase* is a cut !!!
If *now* isn't the time to "Just Say No" , then when IS the time ???

Brent W of CA 6:03PM November 22, 2011

The real issue is whether the American People are intelligent and aware enough to see past the BS that is now coming out of the Republican side and realize that the Republicans are not acting in the best interests of the United States. I wonder!
The Republicans are so clearly favoring the rich and the mighty corporations that only a fool would think that their tax positions will help anyone else. It is also laughable whenever they cry that tax increases will be a job killer. The rich have been packing the money in for over ten years now and there has been no job growth, either since the Recession started, or during the entire George W. Bush administration. It is sleigh of hand and trickle down economic BS.
When will the American People wake up? The worst part is that those people who favor the Republican position live in the states that will just collapse if the Federal Government stops supporting them.

Joel L.Friedlander of NY 5:26PM November 22, 2011