Really, Super Committee?

Really? You couldn’t come up with anything?

The Super Committee to Determine This Nation’s Future did nothing last week. Tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in reductions for our national debt (a number that is absolutely huge, unless you’re counting stars, atoms, or this country’s debt) and putting that proposal up for a vote in the Congress – the twelve esteemed members of the committee came up with a goose egg.

It didn’t matter that the Republicans control the House and the Democrats control the Senate, so either party could vote strictly along party lines to derail the proposal. It didn’t matter that the plan could actually have been THE WORST IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD – they couldn’t agree on anything. John Kerry could have walked out of the meeting, strolled up to the microphone, and said with absolute certainty that it would never happen, “Well, uh, we figured out that we can beat this deficit thing if we just get rid the Coast Guard. Well the Coast Guard and Medicare. And that ‘Death Race 2000′ movie where they run over the old people, yeah, that sounds good, too.” John Kyl could have tweeted from the meeting, “Got it… Let them eat cake.” Anything. They didn’t have to come up with something that would have actually been successful – we wouldn’t want to put that kind of pressure on any of our lawmakers. Instead of any proposal at all, half-baked or not, we got “Well, we have a better understanding of each others’ views now.”

Stepping back a bit from the hyperbole, the committee had every chance to “go big.” Instead of $1.2 trillion over 10 years, it could have been $5 trillion or so (our annual budget deficit, the amount we go further in the whole each year, is about $1.4 trillion). They could have taken the Simpson-Bowles plan, maybe made a few nips and tucks here and there, and put it before Congress. They wouldn’t even have to do any of the intellectual heavy lifting there, since the math was already done. They just had to have the spines to do it.