The Hill News

The hand-wringing has begun. The 12 members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction â€" also known as the Super Committee â€" appear to be deadlocked, and many in Washington are looking to the sky to see if it will fall. They shouldn’t worry. In terms of deficit reduction, there’s only one way that the Super Committee can actually fail, and not coming up with a deal isn’t it.
 
Certainly, if the six Democrats and six Republicans on the committee don’t come to a bipartisan agreement that finds at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, some will call that a failure. But in terms of actual deficit reduction, it won’t matter. If they don’t reach agreement, a set of spending cuts will automatically kick in to reduce the deficit over the next ten years by the full amount.
 
Either way, the Super Committee process will result in at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. That comes on top of nearly $1 trillion in spending cuts al! ready enacted as part of the debt limit deal. Together, the total effect will be to reduce the federal budget deficit over the next ten years by about one percentage point of GDP. That may not sound like a lot, but it is almost the same size as the deficit reduction packages of 1990 and 1993. Those pivotal pieces of legislation combined with strong economic growth to produce the first balanced budgets in decades.

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