Apparently The Flaming Wreck Comes First...

A few months ago, I wrote the following entry:

Which Came First?  The Chicken Or The Flaming Wreck?

We will soon have the answer to that question, and it looks like the answer lands squarely on the flaming wreck side.

That post covered a news story from NPR's Planet Money that examined the Congressional Super-Committee through the lens of traditional game theory.  When Congress tied their own shoelaces together and then decided to run around carrying open flames this summer, the result was our country's debt ceiling debacle.  Luckily, a few people finally realized that tripping around while carrying open flames might burn the house down, so a default was narrowly avoided (but not avoided enough for our AAA credit rating to get knocked down on account of Crazy).

But to the credit of Congress, they had the maturity to look in the mirror and admit they might just be batshit crazy, out of touch, selfish, delusional, ineffective, useless, etc...

So they came up with a solution to avoid repeating the debt ceiling crisis.  A super-committee consisting of twelve people, six from each side of the aisle.  They needed to agree upon $1.2 trillion in budget cuts before Thanksgiving or else automatic budget cuts would take effect, hitting everyone's sacred budgetary cows.

My previous post link above talked about games of chicken, rationale minds swerving at the last second,  traditional theories on persuasion, and how those theories often go out the window when small, more intimate groups of people are involved.  Essentially, the super-committee idea set up a much more conducive atmosphere for compromise.

So now you're probably thinking, "Hey, Thanksgiving is three days away."  Which means it's time to find out how our super-committee did.

Not surprisingly, they failed.

Aides: 'Super Committee' Likely To Announce Failure To Reach Debt Deal

I've said it before, but maybe not on this blog.  If I were as bad at my job (which happens to be millionaire playboy yacht racer man about town) as Congress collectively is, I would probably spend three hours a day crying and wondering aloud why God made me such an incompetent loser.

Instead of a small group where cooler heads could prevail, we seemed to have gotten a microcosm of the typical ineffective Congressional crap.  I'll post some choice quotes, but I'm guessing you can already predict how they'll play out.

"I'm going to be waiting all day," Washington Sen. Patty Murray, Democratic co-chair of the committee told CNN's Candy Crowley on "State of the Union."

"I'll be at the table, as I've been, willing to talk to any Republican who says, look, my country is more important, this pile of bills is not going to go away, the challenges that we have is not going to disappear. We need to cross that divide," said Murray.

Senator Murray continues:

"I'll tell you one of the problems has been a pledge that too many Republicans took to a Republican wealthy lobbyist by the name of Grover Norquist, whose name has come up in meetings time and time again," Murray said, adding she was optimistic a compromise would be reached.

Ready for the cliche response from the right?

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona, reiterated the GOP mantra that Bush-era tax cuts should continue and entitlement spending be cut. Democrats are keen on letting the Bush-era cuts expire for the highest-income Americans in 2012.

"In Washington, there are folks who won't cut a dollar unless we raise taxes," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"If you want to get serious about the deficit, our country has to grow economically," Kyl said. "You can't grow, if you raise taxes in the middle of a recession." 

So there you have it, all that hard work and we end up punching ourselves in the groin just like we did over the summer.  So I guess it's a good time to recap who gets screwed by the automatic cuts set to take place.

Half the cuts are required to come from defense, so I guess it's good that our time in Iraq is about to end. Still, the idea of not providing for those who put their lives on the line for this country doesn't feel good.  Not surprisingly, top people in the military have already gone on record protesting these "doomsday" cuts.

Chairman of Joint Chiefs Says Doomday Cut Would Break Military

But those cuts affect more than just the brave men and women serving on the front line.  Military contracts provide massive amounts of jobs.  

Super Committee Members See 'Doomsday' Defense Cuts Loom Large

Some quotes to get the numbers out there.

The cuts could hammer Everett, Wash., where some of the 30,000 Boeing employees are working on giant airborne refueling tankers for the Air Force, or Amarillo, Texas, where 1,100 Bell Helicopter Textron workers assemble the fuselage, wings, engines and transmissions for the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

Billions in defense cuts would be a blow to the hundreds working on upgrades to the Abrams tank for General Dynamics in Lima, Ohio, or the employees of BAE Systems in Pennsylvania.

In Tewksbury and Andover, Mass., deep defense cuts could have serious ramifications for thousands of Raytheon employees working on the Patriot, the air and missile defense system. It was heralded for its effectiveness during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and is now sold to close to a dozen nations, including South Korea, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates.

Take a moment to go back to some of Senator Jon Kyl's comments above about not being able to grow a country by raising taxes in a recession.  Seems like you can't grow a country by slashing massive amounts of jobs either.  I guess we all have our opinions on which is the lesser of two evils, though.

So who else gets the shaft?  The EPA and chunks of Medicare, but Social Security and Medicare programs for those most in need are exempt.

Given that failure seems the most likely outcome, what happens next?  Well, the doomsday cuts aren't set to go into effect until 2013, so the impact wouldn't be immediately felt.  But there is an incompetence loophole built into the procedures.  Technically these mandates and super-committees are just the result of Congressional votes.  There's nothing stopping Congress from throwing up some more votes that change the rules or negate the process entirely.

Apparently failure always is an option whenever Congress is concerned, and luckily that jockstrap stink of ineffectiveness doesn't have to go away anytime soon.