Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman gets right to the heart of the matter and tells the truth about the Super Committee's creation, and intent. Failure was the best thing that could have happened to the committee.
The SuperCommitee was an attempt by 'serious beltway people' to skirt the democratic process. It was an attempt to take the country's deficit problem out of the hands of the voters and put it in to the hands of a secret super committee of twelve, appointed by a larger committee of 100, who have been doing their level best to ignore what voters want.
What voters want is very different from what Washington conventional wisdom wants. Voters favor taxes on high income individuals, they do not want cuts to Medicare or Social Security or raising eligibility or even privatization. For some reason Washington consider these sensible ideas. The committee of 'serious' people was intended to bypass the democratic proess and impose a solution that's not at all what voters want. So let's cheer its failure.
He goes on to explain why the austerity that would have been imposed by the committee would have been badly timed:
This allegedly bipartisan group would dictate a supposed deficit solution which would have been a bad deal on several fronts, so it's better to have no deal. It would have led to spending cuts way too soon - slashing government spending with 9% unemployment and 0% interest rates is a really bad idea. It was a deal between right wing Democrats and really right wing Republicans.
And then he goes to the heart of the matter, revealing the committee's real purpose and goal:
Any deal would have been about dismantling Social Security and Medicare, more so than any deal to address long term deficits.
Social Security and Medicare have galled Republicans since their inception and efforts to undo them have consistently failed. Enormous deficits have been run up in the last decade thanks to Bush tax cuts, the wars, and the economic collapse which are now being used as reasons to raid these funds. As usual we can rely on Paul Krugman to call out the deceit.
Here is audio of the whole interview, where he also addresses Norquist's claims on Meet the Press that Democrats want to 'secretly raise your taxes by a trillion dollars, whereas Republicans' pledge to not raise taxes are a public commitment. He goes on to describe the government as an insurance company with an army, addresses the myth that government can't create jobs, and his thoughts on the Euro Crisis.
There's also a partial transcript here.