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| "Failure is an option" |
| By Loren Steffy, BLOG, chron.com |
| Published: 11/21/2011 |
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The great debt-ceiling charade is now winding down its final act. To the surprise of no one, the so-called Supercommittee is about to end in failure, despite earlier pronouncements that such a failure wasn’t an option. The 12 bipartisan committee members were supposed to hammer out an agreement on deficit cuts by today. They aren’t even close. As I said back in August, this entire exercise simply retreads the work already done by previous committees, most notably the Simpson-Bowles Commission. The problem isn’t that such committees can’t identify solutions to the deficit problems. It’s that no elected leaders have the courage to embrace the solutions. Now we can expect both parties to blame the other for the Supercommittee’s failure, and if you flip through the cable news channels, you’ll see that process has already begun. Meanwhile, the committee’s failure was supposed to trigger $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts, including deep reductions in the defense budget. Not surprisingly, members of Congress, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., are now actively working to stop those automatic cuts from taking effect, Bloomberg News reported. Moody’s Investors Service has already indicated that failure to adopt any deficit-fighting measures by Congress this year would likely cause the rating agency to follow Standard & Poor’s lead and downgrade its rating on U.S. debt. Not surprisingly, U.S. stocks are plunging. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 268.45, or more than 2 percent, in early trading, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index tumbled 26.09 to 1,189.56. “click here for more information” . |
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