Super comité = super catastrophe?

Le fameux "super comité" qui devait proposer une série de mesures concernant le budget semble se diriger vers une impasse.

"As of Tuesday morning, betting on the Super Committee to succeed would be playing the odds.

A key member of the Senate Democratic leadership team has openly predicted the panel will gridlock and fail, and placed the blame squarely on Republicans.

As GOP committee members met privately, Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen — a Democrat on the panel — told Bloomberg, “You need to close some of these tax loopholes and you need to generate additional revenue. And so that balance is going to be important. We saw the dueling letters just last week. We had a bipartisan group in the House that said, ‘Look, everything is on the table including revenues - tax revenues.’ And within 24 hours you had 33 [Republican] Senators say, ‘no new net tax revenues.’”

Republicans responded with a trial balloon, provided first to Wall Street Journal editorial writer Stephen Moore. “One positive development on taxes taking shape is a deal that could include limiting tax deductions, perhaps by capping write-offs on charities, state and local taxes, and mortgage interest payments as a percentage of each tax filer’s gross income,” he wrote. “In exchange, Democrats would agree to make the Bush income-tax cuts permanent. This would mean preventing top rates from going to 42% from 35% today, and keeping the capital gains and dividend tax rate at 15%, as opposed to plans to raise them to 23.8% or higher after 2013.”

Privately, Democratic aides dismissed the offer — which was not extended officially, only floated in the press — as an attempt by the GOP to pretend they’re playing nice. And though Republican aides spoke positively of the idea, they might find that a guy named Grover Norquist isn’t such a big fan.

All of these signs augur for gridlock, with just over two weeks until the panel is required to report a proposal to Congress and mere days before its recommendations must be sent off to the Congressional Budget Office for a final dollar-figure estimate."

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/how-the-super-committee-reached-the-brink-of-failure.php?ref=fpa