"Retrospective determinism" is the term historians use to caution against the mistake of treating the fact that something did
happen as proof that it had to
happen. Don't forget, in other words, that the chain of events leading to a particular denouement included choices and contingencies, many of which could have gone this way rather than that way, possibly altering the final outcome.
Sometimes, though, it really is hard to see how events could have turned out differently. Congressional and White House negotiators spent the summer trying to come up with a "grand bargain" to, in the short term, raise the debt ceiling and, over the coming decade, make the national debt a shrinking portion, not a growing one, of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. They couldn't strike that deal, so they agreed
to raise the debt ceiling, in stages, by $2.1 trillion over the coming year. In exchange, the deal met the demand by the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, that every dollar by which the debt ceiling was increased be matched by a dollar of deficit reduction.
The August 2011 agreement specified cuts in spending to many, though not all, federal programs. Additional deficit cuts would either happen automatically, if Congress did nothing, or according to the plans devised by a congressional "supercommittee" that was evenly divided in every way: six members of the House, three from each party; and six senators, three from each party. If the supercommittee came up with a plan that reduced the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion, Congress could vote it up or down - but not amend it - and the president could sign or veto the law if Congress passed it.
The failure of the supercommittee, confirmed this week, was foreordained in the sense that the overlap between the list of all the deficit plans congressional Democrats could agree to, and all the plans Republicans could agree to, turned out to be a null set. There was, most fundamentally, no way to split the difference between the Democrats' insistence that any deficit reduction plan had to include some tax increases and the Republicans' insistence that no tax increase could be part of the plan.
The supercommittee's failure to agree on a deal that the full Congress could vote on means that the automatic cuts agreed upon in August are supposed to take effect in 2013. The structure of those cuts was designed to be unpleasant enough that the supercommittee members would have real incentives to come up with a bipartisan plan. At the same time they reflected how each party thinks about what its highest priority does and does not include.
The automatic cuts will affect a lot of federal discretionary spending, but not such big safety net programs as Social Security and Medicaid. Democrats give highest priority to the entitlement programs for two reasons, one political, the other psychological. The political reason is that it's easy to rally voters, especially older ones, against the threat of cuts to these programs. The psychological one is that Democrats regard these programs as their party's most glorious achievements in the 20th century. To acquiesce in curtailing or restructuring them would put a question mark where Democrats want an exclamation point. The problem with protecting entitlements at all costs, however, is that those costs will eventually include some discretionary domestic programs that Democrats believe are vital to the nation's well-being, as Mark Schmitt has argued
The gamble in setting up the supercommittee was that at least some Democrats would be be so opposed to those domestic cuts that they would vote for entitlement reductions as the lesser of two evils. That's not what happened. The other part of the gamble was that Republicans would be so opposed to automatic cuts in defense spending over the coming decade that they would vote for tax increases as the lesser of two evils. That didn't happen, either. As Peter Beinart contended
, Republicans have reached the point where national security concerns have been subordinated to the mission of limiting government and holding the line against tax increases.
That Congress was amenable to serious cuts in discretionary spending on both domestic and defense programs may be construed as an indication that Capitol Hill, for the time being, is content to live with the modest curtailment of deficit spending that results when entitlement cuts and tax increases are both off the table. It could, on the other hand, mean that Congress is content to live with this padlock on future spending because it knows that it will always possess the key to that lock. Both parties, that is, feel that they'll figure out how to avoid the inevitable spending cuts that are supposed to begin in 2013. The history of past efforts to force spending discipline on Congress by threatening automatic, across-the-board spending cuts, such as the Gramm-Rudman limits of the 1980s, gives every reason to believe that Congress can figure out a way around the limits it imposes on itself.
Another sense in which the supercommittee's failure was baked in the cake was that its stalemate is a pretty accurate reflection of the electorate's unresolved marching orders about what the government should do. Republicans prevailed in the elections of 2004 and 2010, Democrats in the elections of 2006 and 2008. With a Democratic president, a Democratic majority in the Senate, and a Republican majority in the House, the voters have given partial, ambiguous endorsements to both party's approaches, but clear, unequivocal support to neither. This ambivalence is not surprising. Clear support for the Democrats would mean big tax increases, and clear support for the Republicans would mean big entitlement cuts. Neither will be pleasant, and the desire to postpone having to choose is understandable.
Nonetheless, the financial pages remind us every day that sovereign debt crises are hard for democracies to avoid, but really, really
hard for them to solve. The voters are running out of elections cycles in which they can decide by not deciding. Now that all politics is fiscal, the 2012 election is likely to be dominated by the choice between the parties' mutually exclusive approaches to taxing and spending.