What does Washington do when big decisions need to be made but no one wants to make them?
Set up an ad hoc committee! Have a selected bunch of experts, plus a balance of politicians from both sides of the aisle, bunch together and hunch over the same deleterious options which the elected officials refused to face head on before.
Within a week or month, they will offer recommendations split along party lines, just as the American people have seen played out again and again in Congress. They will file the final recommendations in another thick book which no one will read, a set of options which every legislator and pundit will excoriate as too easy on the rich and too hard on the poor.
The recent Super (er…Superficial) Committee will enact further cuts, alarmingly slim in retrospect to the dire budget calamities which will befall this nation if drastic action is not taken to safeguard the long term interests of this country.
As hoc committees are leaving more well-minded economists speechless, if not spitting mad, yet in Washington, when politicians are planning for the next election instead of this nation's future, we can only expect that they will kick fiscal discipline to another body to deliberate, who will in turn kick the can down the road, which will in turn become worse for wear when this issue must be discussed again, in another two or three months.