With 5 Weeks to Go, No Consensus on Deficit Panel

[alp227]

Source: NY Times

With just five weeks until its deadline, a secretive Congressional committee seeking ways to cut the federal deficit is far from a consensus, and party leaders may need to step in if they want to ensure agreement, say people involved in the panel’s work.

The 12-member committee is just over halfway through the 76-day interval from its first meeting to the date its final report is due on Nov. 23, but has not gained much traction. The lawmakers have not agreed on basic elements like a benchmark against which savings will be measured.

The panel’s members, evenly divided between the two parties, spent most of September in a standoff. Republicans refused to budge from their position against new taxes. Democrats said they would not discuss cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare unless Republicans made a firm commitment to accept additional revenues.

The two leaders of the panel, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, have told committee members not to talk publicly about their work. But other lawmakers and Congressional aides privy to the panel’s effort have provided a remarkably consistent picture of the deliberations as the committee tries, in a matter of weeks, to find fiscal answers that have eluded Congress and the White House for years.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/us/politics/congressional-deficit-panel-still-not-close-to-a-plan.html

[Demeter]

1. This is good news, believe it or not

The sooner the farce closes, the better for us.

[bluestateguy]

2. Good. I hope they fail and just go away and leave us all alone

We need to be talking about jobs, not phantom deficits.

[Scuba]

3. There's an emerging consensus that the whole damned idea is unconstitutional. n/t