Deficit Panel: Not much progress

The 12-member bipartisan 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 made very few decisions. 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. They have said very little publicly about their discussions or whether any progress has been made on the politically explosive issues of tax hikes and spending cuts for government healthcare and retirement programs. Several committee members said they were afraid of failure. They know that voters, investors and credit-rating agencies will take the panel’s work as evidence of how well Congress functions. Failure by the super committee to reach agreement would trigger $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, starting in 2013, evenly divided between military and domestic programs.