The super committee: I called it, kind of

It appears the 'super committee' didn't reach a deal for deficit reduction. So now the spending cuts are supposed to be triggered. And the Dems seem to be on board with letting them go through. Here is what I said when they cut this deal:

So the more I think through this the more inclined I am to agree with Kevin Drum (who I cited in my previous post) that its unlikely whatever comes out of the committee will be agreed upon. The interests competing against each other are strong and have leverage within this divided gov't. Given that and an already agreed upon solution if they don't sign off on the committee's plan, I think it will be very difficult to avoid the trigger. And because Obama and Democrats didn't do too bad of a job in the debt ceiling deal, that trigger will actually cut stuff that needs to be cut.

I wasn't completely right. A lot of people have come out since then and said that it will be difficult to really cut certain things in the automatic trigger. And I thought there was a chance that the committee would actually agree on a plan and present it to congress. They couldn't even get that far. And its obviously all about taxes. Republicans continue to propose massive spending cuts and basically no revenue increases. Same old story.

Matt Yglesias, now at Slate instead of ThinkProgress, has been reminding people on Twitter that all congress has to do is sit back and do nothing in order to make substantial progress on deficit reduction. As a reminder, that means letting the Bush tax cuts expire. They have to hold a vote in order to extend them. So it will be up to Dems in the Senate and Obama to actually do something to decrease the deficit, which would be to do nothing.