November 21, 2011Supercommittee announces failure in effort to tame debt
Special congressional supercommittee acknowledged failure Monday in efforts to cut the federal deficit by at least $1.2 trillion.
“After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline,” the co-chairman of the panel said in a joint statement.
“Despite our inability to bridge the committee’s significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation’s fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve,” the statement said. “We remain hopeful that Congress can build on this committee’s work and can find a way to tackle this issue in a way that works for the American people and our economy.”
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The co-chairmen, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), said they were “deeply disappointed that we have been unable to come to a bipartisan deficit reduction agreement.”
The panel’s failure was announced in a joint statement issued in late afternoon after the close of U.S. stock markets, which plunged during the day. Democrats had pushed for a joint public appearance by the committee’s co-chairmen, but even that goal proved elusive.
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) floated a last-minute tax plan and met in his office with a fellow Democrat on the panel, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), along with Republican senators Jon Kyl (Ariz.) and Rob Portman (Ohio). There was no immediate breakthrough, however, and the supercommittee’s nearly three months of work ended quietly.
“It’s sort of a last-ditch effort to try to see if we could find a way to solve America’s problem here,” Kerry said in late afternoon. “We need to do deficit reduction. We don’t need to be doing another round of tax cutting.”
Kerry said the co-chairmen of the supercommittee “will tell us when and if it’s worth pursuing.” He denied Republicans’ contention that Democrats were not united around his plan.
Even before supercommittee’s statement, news that the special deficit-reduction panel had failed to meet its mandate to shave $1.2 trillion from the federal debt helped drive down stock markets that were already jittery over the European debt crisis. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 2 percent, and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Nasdaq also lost ground.
With the clock ticking toward a Thanksgiving eve deadline, the six Republicans and six Democrats on the committee had essentially given up on forging a compromise. Some elected instead to spend their final hours casting blame and pointing fingers.
Kerry said efforts ultimately foundered over the Republican refusal to accept any tax increases on the wealthy in exchange for spending cuts.
“This is a matter of fundamental fairness,” Kerry told CNN. “We are stuck on this insistence of making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent. I think the American people will judge that to be insane.”
Kyl, for his part, blamed Democrats for insisting that taxes on more affluent Americans be increased. “Our Democratic friends said we won’t cut one dollar more without raising taxes,” Kyl said. “That tells you a lot about the ethos in Washington. We went into the exercise to try to reduce federal government spending. What we get from the other side is, no, we won’t make more cuts unless you raise taxes.”
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