Does anyone need any additional evidence that our political system is completely broken? The bipartisan congressional supercommittee that was given two months to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts over the next decade has failed to reach an agreement. It is an epic failure and a national embarrassment. The truth is that they never even came close to an agreement. In fact, as you will read below, the two sides on the panel have been barely even talking to each other. In the end, the supercommittee was a super joke. Meanwhile, the U.S. national debt has passed the 15 trillion dollar mark and we are facing trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. We are heading directly for a national financial disaster, and our "leaders" seem powerless to do anything about it.
According to the supercommittee's rules, any plan would have had to have been submitted to the Congressional Budget Office by Monday in order to give the CBO 48 hours to analyze how much the plan would reduce budget deficits over the coming decade.
When the supercommittee was announced, it made headlines all over the world, but now it is ending with a whimper.
The supercommittee was never a good idea in the first place, but you would have thought that they could have come up with something over the course of two months.
But instead all they are giving us are a whole bunch of excuses and a whole lot of hot air.
What a joke.
Is it really that difficult to come up with $1.2 trillion in cuts over a decade?
It isn't as if they would even be cutting very deeply. $1.2 trillion in cuts would not even cut the budget by $150 billion a year. We would still be talking about trillion dollar deficits way into the future.
But instead of agreeing to some token cuts, they have chosen to do nothing and to blame each other.
So now $1.2 trillion in "automatic budget cuts" will go into effect starting in 2013. But even that $1.2 trillion figure contains a lot of "fuzzy math". For example, it includes $169 billion in "projected savings" from "reduced interest costs" on the national debt.
I would love to see how they came up with that figure.
In any event, the truth is that none of these numbers really matter at all.
Why?
None of the budget cuts go into effect until after the 2012 election. That means that this Congress can vote to repeal the automatic cuts well before then.
Some in Congress are already pushing for this. For example, U.S. Senator John McCain said the following recently....
"It's something we passed. We can reverse it."
Or, even more likely, once the new president and the new Congress are elected in 2012 they will almost certainly choose to abandon this agreement.
When it comes to politics, the only thing that matters is what happens before the next election.
All of this talk of future cuts is just an illusion. When the next president and the next Congress come to power, they will want to do their own thing.
So after all of the huffing and puffing over the last couple of years, what has actually been accomplished as far as reducing our horrific budget deficits?
Not much at all.
We racked up a $1.3 trillion budget deficit during the fiscal year that just ended, and this fiscal year we will be somewhere in the same neighborhood.
We have been living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, and at some point all of this is going to end very, very badly.
The total amount of debt in this country (government, business and consumer) has been rising much, much faster than our national income has. If you don't believe this, just check out this chart.
In particular, government debt is totally out of control. When Barack Obama first took office, the national debt was 10.6 trillion dollars.
It is now over 15 trillion dollars.
We are in debt up to our eyeballs and we desperately need our leaders to do something about it.
But according to a recent Politico article, the members of the supercommittee haven't even been talking to each other....
The supercommittee last met Nov. 1 – three weeks ago! It was a public hearing featuring a history lesson, “Overview of Previous Debt Proposals,” with Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles, Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin. The last PRIVATE meeting was Oct. 26. You might as well stop reading right there: The 12 members (6 House, 6 Senate; 6 R, 6 D) were never going to strike a bargain, grand or otherwise, if they weren’t talking to each other. Yes, we get that real deal-making occurs in small groups. But there never WAS a functioning supercommittee: There was Republican posturing and Democratic posturing, with some side conversations across the aisle.
Can you believe that?
Could it really be true that they have not met since November 1st?
Is Congress really that much of a joke?
According to Real Clear Politics, the approval rating for Congress is sitting at about 12 percent right now.
After this, it may get even lower.
Instead of working on a solution to our problems, the members of the supercommittee have been busy going on television and telling us who to blame.
The following is a short exceprt from a recent article in the Washington Post....
Republicans on the supercommittee held a conference call Saturday morning, and aides said members from both parties continued to talk by phone. But neither side was predicting a last-minute breakthrough. Instead, seven panel members booked appearances on the Sunday talk shows, as both sides readied their best arguments for why the other is at fault.
Our politicians are obsessed with finding someone else to blame and with getting ready for the next election.
Meanwhile, the ship is going down and people are starting to panic.
And this is not going to look good to the rest of the world at all. There is a very real risk that one of the other major credit rating agencies will decide to downgrade U.S. debt.
The second downgrade of debt is often more important than the first. When the first downgrade happened, U.S. debt still had a AAA rating from the other two major credit rating agencies.
But after another downgrade, the average credit rating of U.S. debt will be less than AAA. That will mean that U.S. debt will no longer be a cash proxy. A lot of transactions that take place right now in the financial world would not be able to happen if that takes place.
So what do our leaders need to do?
Well, the truth is that we should recognize that they are in a really, really tough position. Decades of nightmarish decisions have left us out of good options under our current financial system.
The reality is that members of Congress are damned if they do and they are damned if they don't.
This is what I mean - if we don't deal with our national debt now, everyone agrees that a massive day of reckoning is coming down the road. Greece is an example of what happens when debt catches up with a nation.
However, if we did cut the federal budget very deeply right now, it would almost certainly bring on a huge economic contraction.
Right now, insane federal spending is one of the only things keeping this economy afloat. If you were to suddenly pull half a trillion dollars (or more) of federal spending out of the economy, it would have a devastating impact.
A lot of people out there correctly argue for a huge reduction in federal spending, but they greatly underestimate the amount of pain that it would cause.
Let there be no doubt, all of this federal debt has enabled us to enjoy a "false prosperity" for several decades, and when we dramatically cut back on spending a lot of that "false prosperity" is going to disappear.
Our "real economy" is rapidly being gutted and America is becoming poorer as a nation every single day. One way that we have been making up the difference is by going into almost unbelievable amounts of government debt. When the government debt bubble pops, the pain is going to be enormous.
If you do not believe this right now, you will believe it soon enough.
Not that we should keep going into huge amounts of debt.
Every dollar that we "borrow" is actually being stolen from our children and our grandchildren.
In fact, that is what Thomas Jefferson believed. According to Jefferson, when the federal government borrows money in one generation which must be paid back by future generations it is equivalent to stealing....
And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
We have got to stop stealing from future generations. If they get the chance, they will curse us for what we have done to them.
Anyone out there that supports our current system of running endless budget deficits is supporting a horrific crime against our children and our grandchildren.
But once again, we all need to clearly understand that when the borrowed money stops flowing out of Washington D.C., our economy is going to get much worse.
Are you prepared for the unemployment rate to double?
Are you prepared for foreclosures to soar to unprecedented heights?
Are you prepared for economic pain unlike anything you have ever seen before?
According to the New York Times, there are 100 million Americans that are either living in poverty or that are considered to be among the "near poor" right now.
So how bad will things get if we plunge into a depression?
Anyone that believes that we can drastically cut the federal budget and improve the economy at the same time under our current system is not being rational.
Just look at what is happening to Greece. They implemented substantial budget cuts (although not nearly big enough to bring them to a balanced budget) and they have plunged into a nightmarish economic depression.
Right now, we are in a position where we are going to experience a horrific amount of pain whatever we do. If we keep piling up debt at this rate we will experience a nightmare, but if we pop the debt bubble and try to live within our means we will also experience a nightmare.
There is a way out of this, but our politicians are not talking about it. As I have written about previously, if the federal government abolishes the Federal Reserve and starts issuing debt-free money, we could eliminate our federal budget deficits, cut taxes and improve the economy all at the same time.
But nobody is even talking about debt-free money.
Instead, all of our politicians are talking about "fixing" the current system.
Well, let me tell you, it is impossible to solve our problems under the current system. If we insist on maintaining our current debt-based financial system, it will only end in a massive amount of pain.
The American people need to get educated about our financial system. They need to learn that the Federal Reserve and the debt-based currency that they issue are at the very heart of our economic problems.
Back in 1913, prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the national debt was only about $2.9 billion.
Today, our national debt is over 5000 times larger.
Debt-based central banking is a perpetual debt machine. It is at the heart of our financial problems and it is also at the heart of the financial problems that Europe is experiencing.
Unfortunately, the American people don't understand this, and there are virtually no politicians out there that are even talking about this.
Very dark days are ahead for America.
You had better get prepared.
“[A]ll of our politicians are talking about “fixing” the current system.” So true!
Governments (those in them, behind them and close friends of them) will do everything they can think of to stay in power. These people are less honest than robbers, because while they arrange to expropriate your money – via the threats of physical force or its actual initiation by enforcers – they insist that they are doing you a favor. A robber simply takes your money w/o any such pretense.
The major problem here regarding the mess the US government has made of the economy in this country (and similarly in other countries by those governments) is that the greater majority of the populace has swallowed for years the propaganda the government has put out – that being that the government’s job is to “run the country”, which includes “being in charge” of the economy. You & I both know that “the economy” is really just the collection of all the transactions of monetary value between individuals. When the government becomes a 3rd party, via its almost countless number of regulations, it distorts the choices of all parties to all transactions. Even more important (and often not considered) are the choices that never become available because of government regulations. Government is the ultimate interferer and destroyer!
Government is death to creativity even while it pretends to nurture it, because it stifles what it can’t control.
Government is the death to self-responsibility while promoting security, because those individuals who want security above all else will both yield responsibility to and defer authority to government. When people view government as the seat of responsibility and authority they are pawns to that government, good only as taxpayers and cannon fodder.
The technological advances have in the past ~20 years moved faster than the US government has been able to control and direct. This has enabled a growing number of young and previously ignorant older individuals to become aware of what has taken place in previous generations of government and currently. The curtain has been pulled from around the Wizard manipulating the controls of OZ. More than the original single child are crying that “the Emperor has no clothes!”.
But the most important fact is still the biggest open secret – that the enforcers are the key to what keeps any government in operation, especially once the majority of the population realize that laws/edict/mandates/regulations/etc are a bunch of hooey, and even downright harmful. These words only become reality because there *are* government enforcers, those willing to threaten and actually initiate physical force to compel individuals to do something they would not do of their uncoerced choice. And there are plenty of instances, more each year and well documented, of enforcers initiating physical force – even to the point of death – as they enforce various “orders” from above.
The solution to this entire situation must come from each individual – and it can because the technology exists for virtually all people to be in touch with each other. Representatives served a purpose in the past, but they are no longer necessary.
I have provided this list before, but it warrants repeating:
1. Do not make use of “government services” that can be obtained privately;
2. Initiate/support cooperative efforts that replace “government services”;
3. Do not work for or do business with governments of any form in any capacity;
4. Preferentially associate with those who do not work for governments – positive social preferencing;
5. Do not voluntarily associate with those who continue to work for government despite being encouraged not to do so – negative social preferencing;
6. Last but not least – and actually primary to the preceding, Practice self-responsibility and encourage the same by all others, especially children and young people.
It is clear that a better society is the desire of most, if not all, of the activists against government’s high taxes, privileges to some and choice-limiting regulations. However, it needs to be understood that the withdrawal of sanction and the practice of self-responsibility are both necessary for any real changes in human society which will benefit each member all at the same time. More: http://selfsip.org/focus/protestsnotenough.html
My question is, what on earth is going on in
the white house? Are obummer, holder, and the
rest laying around with their hands down their
pants watching Espn? The silence from the white
house is deafening! Leaders? What leaders?
….(tap tap….hello?….is this thing on?)
It is truly sad what America has become. Are
we no longer capable of accomplishing ANYTHING?
A ‘Supercommitee’, with two months, isn’t able
to cut $150 billion/year out of the budget?
Was it you, Michael, that said something about
how we were headed for WWIII, Civil War and
an Economic Collapse all at once?
I can’t prep enough, fast enough. We are F’D!
The Unconstitutional Supercommittee waited until immediately after the markets closed to officially announce their failure. They did this so as not to upset their Wall Street Masters. But did they have to make it so blatantly obvious that this is so?
Talks cheap… dont get mad get even— take your positions of of the big 5 (or 6)banks,,, claim 9 on a new W4 (and then dont file) or shut the hell up… could you, or would you do this —NO… not guts no glory. Good slave…good boy…
Vote Ron Paul !!
Well, the Supercommittee has proven they aren’t as powerful as the Justice League, or even the Fantastic Four. When you want something done, count on Spiderman. (Ha!!)
You Supercommittee members may turn in your uniforms and capes now.
perhaps you should weight the value of the 1913 national debt, as 2.9 billion then is the equivalent of 520 billion in 2011.
not a huge difference but nonetheless you should compare apples and apples.
Welcome USA to the 100 % debt to GDP ratio club yesterday nov/20/2011.
I did not have any idea and how to solve it.
The real failure is the people in this country. We put up with this nonsense because we don’t know what to do about it. I don’t think anyone believe the so called super committee would solve anything. If we keep this up, not only will we lose our jobs and our homes, we will lose this country.
If you care:
FIGHT THE CAUSE – NOT THE SYMPTOM
Read “Common Sense 3.1” at ( http://www.revolution2.osixs.org )
They treat us like dumb animals because act like dumb animals.
Failed… and a good thing, too.
In the Book of Proverbs it states: “don’t owe any man anything.”
The early church was told to “care for the widows and orphans.” The church gradually failed to do so and the government took over…so we have social programs.
How much of your church’s budget goes to the poor and the needy? How much have you given to those around you who are genuinely needy?
The news reported that the annual Boy Scout food drive was much less than was hoped for!
God help us!
This committee was supposed to fail!! The president wants an issue he can run on in the next election . He can’t run on his record its all bad , so he thru this committee out there to fail and give him some traction .
Us downgrade = no risk “free” rate. Now how the hell will the markets function without a stable backing…. They won’t for long, even the egyptian markets are suspended could you imagine the panic and monetary loss when that happens in the u.s. (even for one day). hate to say it but I won’t shed a tear when these elitist (wall st or Washington ) start jumping from the skyscrapers of Morgan Stanley, bofa, and citigroup. Ive been broke my whole 24 yrs (relatively) so it won’t be too much difference just more ramen noodles take it back to the dorm daze haha
The government knows all of this only too well, and are now all-out attackling alternative media – http://economicsurvivor.net/2011/11/22/first-they-came-for-alex-jones/
does anyone acutally believe that the twelve stooges were going to do what they were in the real world supposed to do? they are only doing this because of the public backlash. there will be no attempt now or later to solve this problem because they do no want to,this is just another attempt at stalling the ineveitable, hoping people will get tired and bored with it and it will all go away and
life will continue it’s miserable journey. According
to the bible during the chaos and the madness the antichrist will emerge than things are supposed to get interesting. so the preperations continue.
lmao rednecks. Get over yourselves. The US isn’t that important. The world will keep spinning after the US is long gone unless it tries something funny like use nukes; then the world will keep spinning a bit slower, but with a glassed out North America. It isn’t the end of the world if the US goes down and it sure as hell isn’t in any religious bs comic book.
The US is the greatest threat to the environment mankind has ever seen, with per capita energy use rates twice that of other rich countries and 10 times those of developing countries. Americans use more water in watering golf courses than Africans have to drink. If there is a God, then God has decreed that every last American needs to die to protect his creation, the rest of mankind.
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It was not a failure, it was a success! Spending cuts without raising taxes, is exactly what we need…Those cuts are not nearly enough, we need 5 trillion $$$ in cuts, with no tax increase…
Whoever says this is our children’s debt or our grandchildren’s debt is out of their minds. When you don’t pay your mortgage, they don’t go after your children’s income, they take your house. Creditors will take the assets of the US until we own nothing at all in our own country – only foreigners will own property, industries, anything.
[...] course the failure of the “supercommittee” in the United States certainly is not helping matters. There is already talk that we may [...]
Power of Stupor Comitte Activate!!! Form of Automatic Removal Of Crucial Tax Breaks!! Form of the Deafening Sound of What is Left of Capital and Business Leaving the US !!!
[...] “supercommittee” was supposed to address this problem, but they failed so spectacularly that they have become [...]