The Super Comittee: Failure is Success?

     We are living in an Orwellian world so there's no surprise that the failure of the Super Committee to strike a bargain, grand or otherwise, may as Krugman says, be the best that we could have hoped for. As he puts it, "Failure is good."

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/opinion/krugman-failure-is-good.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

   As there was no debt crisis and the budget deficit should not be our priority right now there was no reason for any "Super Committee" which is also a fine Orwellian name. As Dean Baker puts it, our strategy to bring down the deficit should be to ignore it and create growth.

   At this point absent any action $1.2 trillion worth of spending cuts equally divided between military and domestic programs.

      http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/69263_Page2.html

      While the domestic spending cuts are pretty evenly divided between mandatory and discretionary spending in military spending all but $1 billion of the total $464 billion in cuts are discretionary spending. This is after all the heart of the matter as these discretionary cuts in new defense spending are supposed to be enough incentive for the Republicans to stay at the negotiating table.

     Judging by the failure of the committee it doesn't appear it was, though the Republicans did talk about passing something that would prevent them from happening. This points to the whole problem as Krugman points out: the Republicans won't live by any agreement anyway:

     "...history tells us that the Republican Party would renege on its side of any deal as soon as it got the chance. Remember, the U.S. fiscal outlook was pretty good in 2000, but, as soon as Republicans gained control of the White House, they squandered the surplus on tax cuts and unfunded wars. So any deal reached now would, in practice, be nothing more than a deal to slash Social Security and Medicare, with no lasting improvement in the deficit."

    Interestingly one cut in Medicare which actually add to the deficit though this is what liberals have been arguing in any proposed cut to Obama's health care law, which of course has fallen on deaf ears:

     "One small anomaly in the deficit-reduction effort is CBO’s anticipation that certain cuts to Medicare will result in less money coming into the program from Part B premiums. That represents a cost, rather than a savings, of $31 billion through 2021.

     However, Jim Clyburn suggests that there is no need to worry about the cuts, that they can be undone. Technically they can be undone.

     "Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), a member of the failed Congressional Super Committee, said Tuesday that he would be open to negotiating the sequestration process and scaling back some of the massive mandatory budget cuts — even if this puts him squarely at odds with the White House."

     “I don’t think that we’re locked in to sequester being in its current format,” he said. “We ought to all sit down and find out a way to make sure that we don’t raise taxes on middle income people.…And if it calls for redoing the sequester, that is something we might have a look at.”