Thank You, Joint Committee, And Good Night.

Unless some sort of miracle transpires today, the Joint Committee will hoist the white flag and admit that its 12 members couldn’t cut a piddling $120 billion dollars a year from a yearly federal budget that will be, at its smallest, about $3 trillion (via The Lonely Conservative). In the end, the differences between the two parties are simply too great to allow for any sort of useful compromise. Democrats wanted a tax increase larger than the $300 billion in new revenues reportedly proposed by the Republican members. Republicans, on the other hand, wanted significant entitlement reform and an honest plan to balance the budget in ten years. The GOP went well out on a limb to propose the revenue increases they did and could not have seriously accepted more, not while we’re out here trying to get the economy on its feet again. As for the Democrats, well, this bit of political theater from Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland showed there was no way there would have been enough Democrats on board to pass even token reform measures.

This report by Politico (not an outlet particularly friendly to Republicans) shows that, at least among Democrats, the Joint Committee was far more about changing the political narrative for the next election than it was about fulfilling the deal brokered in good faith during the debt ceiling debate.

I wish I could say I’m surprised that we never got close to even a tiny cut in the size of Washington’s budget. Individual members of Congress control an enormous amount of money — more than any dozen of us put together would earn in our lifetimes. It is hard to simply lay down even a small amount of the power that attracts that much money. We can hope that perhaps our members of Congress will listen to the barely-audible voices of their better angels but we shouldn’t rely on it. A wiser course of action would be to find out who is serious about getting our fiscal situation right and who is not, then we can get about removing the latter group from office in such a decisive way that they can worm their way into a position of public trust again.

The Join Committee let us down. It didn’t have to end in impotent shrugs, but our political situation is such that not even a $15 trillion deficit is enough to focus the attention of our members of Congress. I hope it has focused ours, because the 2012 election is coming and our debt isn’t getting any smaller.