Why the supercommittee won’t fix the problem:
Earlier this month, the supercommittee solicited advice at a hearing from Clinton-era Office of Management and Budget director Alice Rivlin and the co-chairs of President Obama's debt commission, Erskine Bowles and former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson. They addressed all the things that the supercommittee is essentially banned from touching: entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare— even though, as Rivlin pointed out, escalating health care costs related to an aging society are the primary driver of long term debt. Rivlin’s chart:
...Members of Congress have been frantically lobbying their colleagues on the supercommittee to spare this or cut that. The House committee on science, space and technology, for example, wrote to the committee proposing "over $1.5 billion in savings in FY12 alone." Most of the cuts fall heavily on environmentally friendly programs like energy efficiency, renewable energy research and incentives...Meanwhile, the committee pleaded for the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy to be spared any cuts. The proposed savings are barely 1 percent of what’s needed to meet the committee’s goals.
Meanwhile, the House armed services committee implored the supercommittee “to refrain from any further cuts in National Defense,” arguing that "not all elements of the federal budget are equal," and that defense had already experienced "significant reductions" since the debt-reduction discussions began. One glance at this pie chart, though, and it’s clear why defense is an obvious target.
