No one
could have foreseen this.
The supercommittee is struggling. After weeks of secret meetings, the 12-member deficit-cutting panel established under last summer's budget and debt deal appears no closer to a breakthrough than when talks began last month.[...]
The reason? A familiar deadlock over taxes and cuts to major programs like Medicare and the Medicaid.
Democrats won't go for an agreement that doesn't include new tax revenue; Republicans are just as ardently antitax. The impasse over revenues means that Democrats won't agree to cuts to popular entitlement programs like Medicare.
"Fairness has to be a prerequisite for it," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco.
"Fairness" isn't a word that Republicans understand, or at least their definition is widely divergent from what the rest of the nation, call us the 99 percent, would call it. That has to be the Democrats' bottom line: no tax increases, no entitlement cuts. Period.