Ezra Klein: The ‘supercommittee’ misses its big chance

By Ezra Klein,
WashPost
Published: November 20

The “supercommittee,” it turned out, wasn’t so super.

By the end, it hardly mattered whether the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction came to a deal. The 12 members had long since decided against “going big.” They were just trying to eke out $1.2 trillion in savings so they could avoid the $1.2 trillion in deep, automatic cuts to defense and domestic spending that would come if they failed.

In terms of deficit reduction, it was really six of one, a half-dozen of the other. There’s little reason ordinary people should have vastly preferred the deals the supercommittee was considering to the spending cuts that will come if the panel fails. A bad deal, after all, isn’t much better than no deal at all. It might even be worse.

That’s certainly how the rating agencies feel. As a recent Goldman Sachs analysis concluded, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s “have indicated that while a stalemate in the super committee would be negative, they expect $1.2 trillion in planned deficit reduction to materialize through automatic cuts if not through the super committee, so their fiscal outlook should remain unchanged.”

(More here.)