Debt 'Super Committee' to Announce Failure

I'm going to have more on this later. The "super committee" was an utter joke to begin with.

See National Journal, "Super Committee Talks Break Down."

And at New York Times, "Lawmakers Concede Budget Talks Are Close to Failure."

WASHINGTON — Conceding that talks on a grand budget deal are near failure, Congressional leaders on Sunday pointed fingers at each other as they tried to deflect blame for their inability to figure out a way to lower the federal deficit without having to rely on automated cuts.

The testy exchanges — which dominated the Sunday talk shows — made clear that leaders in both parties now see the so-called sequester — a term meaning an automatic spending cut — as the most likely solution to reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years, instead of a negotiated package of spending reductions and tax increases, something they have been unable to achieve over the last 10 weeks.

Democrats blamed the Republicans for their unwillingness to walk away from a no-new-taxes pact they signed at the request of a conservative, antitax group, arguing that the American public realizes that no grand deal could be reached without a combination of spending cuts and new tax revenues.

“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,” Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, the co-chairwoman of the 12-member special Congressional committee on deficit reduction, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

It's the spending, not no new taxes.

Expect updates.