Despite prodding from the White House, a US congressional “supercommittee” yesterday remained deadlocked on forging a deal to cut US$1.2 trillion from government deficits over 10 years.
The 12-member panel has till tomorrow to make public at least a tentative plan and till Wednesday to approve it or risk triggering painful automatic cuts shared between some social programs and military spending.
“We are painfully, painfully aware of the deadline that is staring us in the face,” Representative Jeb Hensarling, the co-chair of the panel, told reporters on Friday, after a closed-door meeting with fellow committee Republicans.
The White House sharply rebuffed calls from some Republicans for US President Barack Obama, who was wrapping up a trip to Asia, to step in to try to break a partisan logjam likely to shape the campaign to the elections in November next year.
“Avoiding accountability and kicking the can down the road is how Washington got into this deficit problem in the first place, so Congress needs to do its job here and make the kind of tough choices to live within its means that American families make every day,” spokeswoman Amy Brundage said.
Hensarling said the committee would meet through the weekend if necessary to “try to find sufficient common ground” on a solution to “simultaneously address both our nation’s jobs crisis and the debt crisis.”
The congressional effort was given a burst of urgency on Wednesday when the US government debt passed the US$15 trillion mark, roughly equal to 99 percent of the size of the total US economy, a level economists consider perilous.
“We’re exploring every angle right now,” Democratic Representative and committee member Chris Van Hollen said after a separate meeting with senators from both parties who sit on the panel.
The committee, created in an August deal on raising the US debt limit, has locked up over Republican refusals of Democratic calls to raise taxes on the very wealthy in return for cuts to cherished social safety net programs.
“This is the divide right now, and we’re still working. I hope we can get there, but I don’t know at this point,” said Democratic Senator John Kerry, a panel member who sits on the Senate’s finance committee.
“If you’re going to ask every average American who drives a car, goes to work, struggles each day to pay their bills, and they’re going to somehow be part of the solution, to have something on the table that does not ask the wealthiest people in the country to share in, that would be unconscionable,” he said.
“Democrats stand united, as we have from day one, believing that great challenges before our country today means that all Americans, the wealthiest among us, need to participate,” said Senator Patty Murray, Hensarling’s Democrat counterpart.
Van Hollen played down talk that the committee could settle on a smaller deficit-cutting plan, with automatic cuts making up the shortfall, saying: “We’re still focused on trying to get an agreement on the full amount.”
Republicans have rejected tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans on grounds that they would cripple job-creating investment even as the brittle US economy labors under stubbornly high unemployment of more than 9 percent.
They have also sought to lay the groundwork for repealing the military spending reductions.
Republicans proposed a limited deal, which would cut the deficit by half of the US$1.2 trillion goal, but protect military spending. However, Democrats rejected it because it offered no new taxes on the rich.
“The idea of Friday, of settling for a half of what the American people need and what we were sent here to do, is unacceptable,” Kerry told reporters.
US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has warned that the automatic cuts, which would kick in come January 2013, would pose a national security risk by leaving the Pentagon weaker, slower and smaller than at any time since World War II.
Any deal would require majority approval on the committee, which is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, after which the full Congress would need to adopt it by Dec. 23 to avoid the automatic cuts.
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