Supercommittee Fails, Politics To Get Even Nastier, More Complicated

There is no way to state it more fully than to say the work of the supercommittee in Washington has been an abject failure.  One can certainly argue about the wisdom of such austere budget cuts that they were considering at this time in relation to the overall economy in such a weakened condition.  But what can not be argued is the inability of a group of seemingly intelligent people who serve in Congress from doing the work they were tasked to complete.  It is an embarrassment that result is failure.

The markets will just love the news.

Many policy items that need to be considered, in one fashion or another, will now need to be dealt with in the highly politicized and divided Congress when we all know they might have been more appropriately handled by the supercommittee.

The next weeks will be chaos in Washington.

But then the past weeks of watching the slow train wreck from the supercommittee has not been any better for the nation.

The supercommittee’s failure “will spark a messy year-end rush to prevent key programs from expiring, and intensifying efforts by disparate groups of lawmakers to push competing deficit-cutting proposals. On the legislative docket: extending unemployment insurance, fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax, reforming the reimbursement formula for physicians who treat Medicare patients and maintaining a payroll tax break first enacted in 2009. All of these expensive provisions are slated to expire at year’s end and had been under consideration by the supercommittee under its fast-track procedures. … [Now], Congress will have to confront these matters individually in the middle of a packed year-end legislative blitz and as funding for the entire government runs out Dec. 16. … Republicans … will continue their uphill climb to try to prevent the Bush-era tax cuts from expiring at the end of [2012].