A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a prominent--and not normally excessively optimistic--budget expert.  This person offered me two reasons to hope that the Supercommittee in charge of finding budget cuts would choose to go big rather than go home.

1.  They would be extraordinarily foolish to pass up this opportunity; the Supercommittee has a great deal of power to do things that are normally very difficult to accomplish.

2.  There had been no leaks; if the talks really weren't going anywhere, both sides would have been leaking like sieves.

I wanted to believe this very much.  Alas, they're now, well, leaking like sieves.  And they're leaking dueling proposals that seem very, very far apart:

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We're still where we were six months ago: Democrats are determined to have substantial tax increases, and the GOP is determined not to.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday rejected a proposal by the Democratic members of the congressional supercommittee on deficit reduction, declaring its $1.3 trillion in tax increases unacceptable.

A majority of the six Democrats on the 12-member panel privately proposed a package that would cut the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years, including more than $1 trillion in tax increases.

Boehner said in a press conference that the amount of new revenue was too high.

“This is the same number that was in the president’s budget, the same number that I don’t know if they found any Democrats in the House and Senate to vote for,” Boehner said. “And so, I don’t think it’s a reasonable number.”

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This is proof that Bob Heinlein was right.

"A committee is a life form with 6 or more legs and no brain."

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ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam
This is proof that Bob Heinlein was right.
"A committee is a life form with 6 or more legs and no brain."

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ORIGINAL: Owner59

This "super committee" has always struck me as a ploy by cons(who control the H-o-Rs) to shirk their leadership responsibilities.

It isn`t working and hasn`t worked and is going down.My guess is that the "leadership" will use the stuper comm. for cover and will blame the dems even tho they control the H-o-Rs.

Super committee = secret,backroom deals,"hidden from the people".

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but the Dems control the Senate

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ORIGINAL: erieangel

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but the Dems control the Senate

The way I see it, with filibuster power, the republicans control both houses.  The Democrats can't get anything the republicans don't like to the floor of the senate for a vote because the republicans have used the filibuster every time.