With the supercommittee’s inability to agree on a debt reduction package last week, John Avlon crunches the numbers and explains why Republicans deserve the most flak.

Tom Friedman says President Obama should admit “that he made a mistake in spurning his own deficit reduction commission, chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and is now adopting Simpson-Bowles — which already has Republican and Democratic support — as his long-term fiscal plan to be phased in after a near-term stimulus. If he did that, he would win politically and create a national consensus that would trump his opponents, right and left.”

“My gut says that if the president lays out such a plan — one that begins
with him taking all the political risks on himself and then demanding
the G.O.P. and his own party follow — he will be both defining himself
and the future in a way that would earn him so much centrist support and
respect that it would leave every possible Republican opponent in the
dust, no matter how obstructionist they are or want to be.”

As expected, the congressional deficit-reduction committee said it had “failed to reach an agreement on slashing the U.S. budget gap, a move that triggers mandatory cuts to military spending and some social programs starting in 2013,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

According to National Journal, President Obama “warned that he will veto any attempt to eliminate the automatic spending cuts that go into effect with that failure.”

He added: “There will be no easy off-ramps on this one.”

Marc Ambinder: “President Obama would have preferred the super committee produce a
bipartisan deal, but what remains is not so bad: the prospect of up to
$6 trillion in debt reduction if Congress does nothing, and the
certainty of sharply defined election-year contrasts with Republicans.”

David Gergen: “It’s difficult to remember a Congress that has put the nation so much at risk in the service of ideology and to hold onto office. Partisans on both sides are grievously failing the country.”

Greg Sargent, in one sentence: “Democrats wanted the rich to pay more in taxes towards deficit reduction, and Republicans wanted the rich to pay less in taxes towards deficit reduction.”

First Read: “The Super Committee’s inability to reach a deal triggers $1.2 trillion in cuts over 10 years in military and civilian spending. That’s on top of the nearly $1 trillion Congress cut to raise the debt ceiling in the summer. And consider this: If Congress and Obama let the Bush tax cuts expire — all of them — that would produce another $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. So if Congress ends up doing NOTHING, you could see $6 trillion in deficit reduction. That said, efforts are already underway to restore military spending cuts, as well as those Bush tax cuts.”

Mike Allen: “The supercommittee last met Nov. 1 — three weeks ago! It was a public hearing featuring a history lesson, ‘Overview of Previous Debt Proposals,’ with Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles, Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin. The last PRIVATE meeting was Oct. 26. You might as well stop reading right there: The 12 members (6 House, 6 Senate; 6 R, 6 D) were never going to strike a bargain, grand or otherwise, if they weren’t talking to each other. Yes, we get that real deal-making occurs in small groups. But there never WAS a functioning supercommittee: There was Republican posturing and Democratic posturing, with some side conversations across the aisle.”

“As long as we have some Republican lawmakers who feel more enthralled
with a pledge they took to a Republican lobbyist than they do to a
pledge to the country to solve the problems, this is going to be hard to
do.”

— Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), in an interview with CNN, on Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge blocking compromise among the debt supercommittee members.

“The congressional committee tasked with reducing the federal deficit is poised to admit defeat as soon as Monday, and its unfinished business will set up a year-end battle over emergency jobless benefits and an expiring payroll tax holiday,” the Washington Post reports.

“The policy battle comes as the parties are gearing up for a high-stakes election season dominated by economic concerns, with both the White House and Congress in play. The political pressure that has helped keep the 12-member supercommittee from compromising on hot-button issues such as taxes is sure to grow more intense.”

“Congress’s last-gasp deficit-cut talks broke into two tracks Friday, with members of a special committee continuing to seek an elusive $1.2 trillion deal while party leaders discussed a smaller, backup plan in case they fail,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Talk of a Plan B reflected the bleak outlook facing the committee as it heads into its final days. It technically has until Wednesday, but the real deadline is midnight Monday, since members by law need 48 hours to scrutinize any plan before voting on it.”

New York Times: “Despite time running out on the committee created by the summer agreement to raise the federal debt limit, negotiations were in disarray, with Republicans and Democrats even disputing what precisely divided them. One panel member said that he still had slim hope for a deal but that it would take an extraordinary development to end the stalemate and avoid a series of automatic cuts in 2013 that would reduce federal services and make substantial reductions in Pentagon spending.”

New census data to be released next week finds one in three Americans — about 100 million people — is in poverty or just above it, the New York Times reports.

“After a lost decade of flat wages and the worst downturn since the Great Depression, the findings can be thought of as putting numbers to the bleak national mood — quantifying the expressions of unease erupting in protests and political swings. They convey levels of economic stress sharply felt but until now hard to measure.”

The House of Representatives voted 261-165  to reject a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, Politico reports.

The vote fell short of the two-thirds majority needed. The House last voted on a balanced budget amendment in 1995, which passed with a 300-132 vote.

Supercommittee talks appeared to be on the brink of collapse, Politico reports, “with neither side hopeful that an agreement can be reached before next week’s deadline.”

Bloomberg: “Republicans and Democrats on Congress’s supercommittee are hardening their positions less than a week before a deadline to produce a U.S. deficit-cutting plan and challenging each other to make the first move toward compromise.”

The issue, of course, is the Bush tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal reports Republicans “are digging in against any agreement that does not
extend current income-tax rates, which are scheduled to expire at the
end of 2012.”

The U.S. national debt has now officially surpassed $15 trillion.

Obama administration officials “are quietly bracing for supercommittee failure, with advisers privately saying they are pessimistic that the 12-member Congressional panel will find a way to cut $1.2 trillion from the deficit as required,” the Washington Post reports.

“Perhaps mindful of the long odds of success, Obama has largely left the negotiations alone, after issuing his blueprint in September for more than $3 trillion in savings… At the same time, several Democrats said, any greater involvement by Obama at this stage could have a toxic effect as Democrats and Republicans try to find middle ground. If the president were more deeply engaged, it could force Republicans into a reactionary role.”

A new CNN/Opinion Research survey shows 78% of Americans think it is “somewhat or very unlikely” the committee will develop a plan to significantly reduce the federal budget deficit by the November 23 deadline.

With exactly one week remaining until the supercommittee on deficit
reduction is due to present its recommendations, House Republican
leaders have begun preparing their full conference for a deal that
includes new tax revenues, according to The Hill.

“The
GOP co-chairman of the deficit supercommittee, Rep. Jeb Hensarling
(R-Texas), briefed the House Republican Conference on the details of
multiple offers that GOP members of the panel have made to their
Democratic counterparts… Some conservatives have said they are
concerned with the GOP’s offer, especially considering the pledge most
of them signed to oppose any net tax increase… Hensarling made no
direct reference to Grover Norquist, the author of the anti-tax pledge,
but he brought up pledges in general, and said that ‘his pledge is to
the people of his district.'”

However, Politico notes rank-and-file Republicans are suspicious and “there seems to be a growing civil war on the right over the idea of tax revenues.”

A new congressional analysis, put together by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and obtained by Newsweek, finds Americans earning more than $1 million a year “collect more than $30 billion in government largesse each year.”

“In all, millionaires receive hefty help from Uncle Sam. The $30 billion in handouts, to put it in perspective, amounts to twice as much as the government spends on NASA, and three times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. On the other hand, it would only cover the cost of fighting about three months in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, eliminating them would help make a small dent in the $1.5 trillion congressional leaders are trying to find by Thanksgiving.”

While Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform boasts that 238
current members of the House of Representatives have signed its Taxpayer
Protection Pledge, The Hill speaks on the record with numerous lawmakers who seem ready to have their names taken off the list.

“In
its publicly displayed list of signers ‘in the 112th Congress,’
Norquist’s group includes several members who say they have specifically
refused to sign the pledge during their most recent campaigns. The
sheet of paper they signed years ago, the lawmakers say, is no longer
valid… Some Republicans have disavowed the pledge not based on a
dispute over its duration, but because they say it constrains their
policy choices.”