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Super Committee Fails

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Jacki Lyden in for Tom Ashbrook

Super-failure for the Super Committee. Now what?

From left, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction attend the panel's last public hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011. The congressional super committee is trying to come up with a package by Thanksgiving that trims the federal deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years.  (AP)
From left, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction attend the panel's last public hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011. The congressional super committee is trying to come up with a package by Thanksgiving that trims the federal deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years. (AP)

Many Americans didn’t pay much attention to the Super Committee or its goals – until it admitted defeat.  The failure of political consensus in the 112th Congress on reaching agreement about how to reduce the nation’s  deficit will get  attention henceforth though, as an  ‘automatic’ buzz saw of 1.2 trillion in cuts begins to whir through everything from the Pentagon to food safety.

What will be fallout for the president? For Congress?  For the American People?

This hour, On Point, the Super Committee’s  ‘Greek tragedy that could have us looking a lot more like Greece.
-Jacki Lyden

Guests

John Harwood, Chief Washington Correspondent, CNBC. Political writer for the New York Times.

Alex Brill, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Tim Dickinson, is a political correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine and author of Rollingstone.com's political blog, National Affairs Daily. His November 9th article for the magazine was, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich”

From The Reading List

Rolling Stone "Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us."

Wall Street Journal "Now that the committee has apparently failed, lawmakers and others are taking a harder look at the automatic cuts, or “sequester,” which will kick in starting January 2013 unless Congress acts. And they look plenty scary."

Slate "For starters, the whole premise of the Supercommittee was that if it didn’t agree on something, then $1.2 trillion of spending cuts would be quasi-automatically implemented through a mechanism known as “sequestration.” The cuts are balanced 50-50 between the security and nonsecurity sides of the budget."

This program aired on November 22, 2011.

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