Congress: No News Is Good News?

Well, what now? As I opine this early Friday a.m., House Republicans and other miscreants failed to take John Boehner’s advice to “get your ass in line” and support a plan to increase the debt limit and shave government spending. And the Senate still has to vote on the Harry Reid and gang plan — although if and when that happens it’s unlikely to get the necessary 60 votes.

Wonder if Kim Kardashian is having better success with her wedding plans? I digress. But hey. This tidbit of info is in keeping with my now long-established tradition of highlighting good news stories on Friday.

Although, I guess at this point depending on your view of the world, no news from Congress is good news. Or not. And if Tiny Tim Geithner has been fibbing about the consequences of a USA default or credit downgrade then you better get the women and children off the streets next week. Things will get really nasty.

The reason? It’s possible that neither plan currently being floated in the House and Senate will prevent a credit downgrade. And neither really address the big fish in the skillet: unsustainable government borrowing and spending — without corresponding tax increases.

Anyway, here are a couple of thoughtful perspectives on what’s happening Inside the Beltway.

First from Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal, “Boehner’s Moment of Truth“:

By Thursday evening, Mr. Boehner had moved a significant portion of his conference, though he proved unable to net the final few votes. Some remained wedded to their vow to never vote for a debt-ceiling hike. Some, like presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann, continued to insist, ludicrously, that a failed deal wouldn’t be a problem. It is an open question if Mr. Boehner could have ever won these votes, no matter how big, deep and dramatic a budget-cutting deal he presented.

What he did do this week is position his party to take credit for a bill that averts a crisis, cuts more spending than any Democrat ever thought possible, and exposes the White House’s insincerity on the deficit and economic prosperity. The Republicans who yesterday undermined bill now bear sole responsibility for whatever political fallout comes next.

And the second from Charles Krauthammer in WaPo, “The great divide“:

We’re in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state. The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic vs. limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health-care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide.

The sausage-making may be unsightly, but the problem is not that Washington is broken, that ridiculous ubiquitous cliche. The problem is that these two visions are in competition, and the definitive popular verdict has not yet been rendered.

We’ll see how this all plays out this weekend. Or not.

In the meantime, I’ll keep checking my snail mailbox waiting for the Kim Kardashian invitation.

Now, for a Friday, that would be good news.

The Heat Dome and Swimming With the Sharks

OK. I’ll admit it. I can’t swim. Well, that’s not totally true. If I fell into the shallow end of a pool I could probably tread water long enough for my feet to find the bottom. So I won’t be heading to the beach or pool like millions of others to get some relief from the heat dome that has settled over the nation.

And at 5 a.m. it’s already hot and humid enough that I figure I might as well just go to the gym and chase the treadmill belt. Might as well sweat in the relative comfort of air conditioning.

I’m sure Diana Nyad would consider me a wuss.

She’s a marathon swimmer who is planning to swim from Cuba to Key West without any real protection from the sharks that apparently consider this to be their pool. Here’s from the NYT, “Ready to Swim 103 Miles With the Sharks“:

KEY WEST, Fla. — Any day now, Diana Nyad will set out to do something no athlete has ever done: swim all day and all night, then all day and all night, then all day again.

She will swim about 60 hours in the churning sea, 103 miles across the Straits of Florida from Cuba to Key West. Every hour and a half, she will stop to tread water for a few minutes as she swallows a liquid mixture of predigested protein and eats an occasional bit of banana or dollop of peanut butter. She will most likely hallucinate and endure the stings of countless jellyfish. Along the way, sea salt will swell her tongue to cartoonish proportions and rub her skin raw.

“She is up against the most outlandish, outrageous, unbelievable physical endurance activity of, certainly, my lifetime,” said Steven Munatones, a champion open-water swimmer who runs the organization Open Water Source and will serve as an independent observer during Ms. Nyad’s swim. “I can’t imagine being in the ocean for 60 hours. I can’t imagine doing anything for 60 hours. It is inconceivable. It simply is.”

“Especially,” he added, “at her age.”

Her age is 61. Ms. Nyad attempted this swim once before, unsuccessfully, in 1978 at the age of 28. She swam inside a shark cage for 41 hours 49 minutes until the raucous weather and powerful current pushed her far off course and she was forced to give up. She had traveled only 50 miles. (One year later, she swam 102 miles from Bimini, in the Bahamas, to Jupiter, Fla., without a shark cage. She still holds the record for the world’s longest ocean swim.)

And about the sharks:

If Ms. Nyad makes it from Cuba to Key West, she will be the first person to have done so without a shark cage. In 1997, an Australian woman completed the swim inside a shark cage. But with a boat pulling the cage, the swim is easier and faster; the woman completed it in less than 24 hours.

“I’m in uncharted territory,” Ms. Nyad said.

Well, I guess I better stop carping about the heat and humidity and just go run.

And I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to swim from Cuba to Key West — with or without sharks tagging along. So good luck to Nyad on that.

But if something happens that she has to postpone or call off the swim, maybe she could head to D.C. this weekend as some real sharks hover under the hot air dome on Capitol Hill trying to reach an agreement on the debt ceiling and government spending.

Prez on Debt Limit: “Don’t Call My Bluff”

Wow. Things are starting to get nasty Inside the Beltway as the Prez and members of Congress play kick the can with the nation’s debt limit and government spending. The daily White House meetings should be televised. Great reality TV.

In yesterday’s episode, the Prez reportedly said several times “enough is enough” and then abruptly walked out of the meeting. Go figure.

Here’s from a story on The Huffington Post, “Obama Warns Cantor ‘Don’t Call My Bluff’ As Debt Talks Stall“:

Lawmakers and the White House had what nearly every party is describing as a “tough” and “testy” meeting on the debt ceiling Wednesday afternoon, culminating in a stormy exchange between President Barack Obama and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

It was the fifth straight day of talks, but the first in which attendees, speaking on background, were willing to admit that steps were taken backwards. According to multiple sources, disagreements surfaced early, in the middle and at the end of the nearly two-hour talks. At issue was Cantor’s repeated push to do a short-term resolution and Obama’s insistence that he would not accept one.

“Eric, don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this,” the president said, according to both Cantor and another attendee. “This process is confirming what the American people think is the worst about Washington: that everyone is more interested in posturing, political positioning, and protecting their base, than in resolving real problems.”

Cantor, speaking to reporters after the meeting, said that the president “abruptly” walked off after offering his scolding.

“I know why he lost his temper. He’s frustrated. We’re all frustrated,” the Virginia Republican said.

Democratic officials had a different interpretation. “The meeting ended with Cantor being dressed down while sitting in silence,” one official said in an email. “[The president] said Cantor could not have it both ways of insisting on dollar-for-dollar and still not being open to revenues.”

And at the same time, there appears that some are giving serious consideration to Mitch McConnell’s wet dream to solve the debt issue. As best I can tell, he wants to give the Prez the authority (without Republicans having to vote on it) to hike the debt ceiling — with the subsequent hope and prayer that there will be spending cuts implemented in three stages.

For once I agree with the editors at WaPo who opine this morning “McConnell’s escape hatch: The best Washington can do?“:

The McConnell plan offers political cover for cowardice and irresponsibility. If it is the best Washington can do, it is better than nothing. But it’s not much of an advertisement for what Washington can do.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the USA women’s soccer team advanced to the finals of the World Cup on Sunday with a thrilling victory over France. Here’s a great report from Sally Jenkins in WaPo, “U.S. women’s soccer team takes joy in forging its own identity“:

Pardon any typos; they’re the result of sprains from doing an Abby Wambach slide across the living room floor after watching the U.S. women’s soccer team make the World Cup final. The American women have at last forged their own identity, those gorgeous toughies, with their bulging shoulders and their sweat-plastered hair and their habit of storming and screaming their way out of trouble.

Bulletin to the spray-on tan crowd: Beat it. The big girls are here.

Just a thought here but worth considering.

Perhaps the Prez, Eric Cantor and the others trying to figure what’s on or off the table these days are getting testy because they can’t watch the live broadcasts of the USA women’s team and the World Cup matches.

Let’s hope they aren’t meeting about the deficit during the final on Sunday. Things could get really dicey in the West Wing.

Uncle Sam: How Much Money Do You Get?

As best I can tell, I don’t receive any money directly from Uncle Sam. I’m eligible to collect Social Security, but I’m not as yet. Saying that, plenty of people are getting substantial folding green from the federal government. And I’m not just talking about federal government employees, members of the military and so on.

Here’s an interesting and informative NYT article, “Economy Faces a Jolt as Benefit Checks Run Out“:

An extraordinary amount of personal income is coming directly from the government.

Close to $2 of every $10 that went into Americans’ wallets last year were payments like jobless benefits, food stamps, Social Security and disability, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. In states hit hard by the downturn, like Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Ohio, residents derived even more of their income from the government.

By the end of this year, however, many of those dollars are going to disappear, with the expiration of extended benefits intended to help people cope with the lingering effects of the recession. Moody’s Analytics estimates $37 billion will be drained from the nation’s pocketbooks this year.

In terms of economic impact, that is slightly less than the spending cuts Congress enacted to keep the government financed through September, averting a shutdown.

Unless hiring picks up sharply to compensate, economists fear that the lost income will further crimp consumer spending and act as a drag on a recovery that is still quite fragile. Among the other supports that are slipping away are federal aid to the states, the Federal Reserve’s program to pump money into the economy and the payroll tax cut, scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

“If we don’t get more job growth and gains in wages and salaries, then consumers just aren’t going to have the firepower to spend, and the economy is going to weaken,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, a macroeconomic consulting firm.

Job growth has remained elusive. There are 4.6 unemployed workers for every opening, according to the Labor Department, and Friday’s unemployment report showed that employers added an anemic 18,000 jobs in June.

In Arizona, where there are 10 job seekers for every opening, 45,000 people could lose benefits by the end of the year, according to estimates from the state Department of Economic Security. Yet employers in the state have added just 4,000 jobs over the last 12 months.

OK. The NYT editors would argue to extend jobless benefits and other safety net benefits until hell freezes over. But realistically that ain’t going to happen — with the Prez and liberals and conservatives in Congress facing some tough choices about how to cut spending. (For an interesting perspective on the debt-ceiling debacle under way Inside the Beltway see Dan Balz in WaPo, “In debt-ceiling talks, Obama tries to keep his balance.”)

So again that brings us to jobs. If we can’t figure out a way to generate and sustain enough quality jobs for those who want and need them today and tomorrow, then we are going to become France. Go figure.

And David Brooks opines in his NYT opinion article this morning that there is no “magic lever” to job creation or fixing the economy.

These three groups — bankers, Democratic Keynesians and staunch Republicans — have one thing in common: They all believe they have identified the magic lever. They believe they can control their economic fate.

Some of us do not believe there is a magic lever. Deficit spending stimulates growth, but not by that much. Tax increases are bad, but they are not disastrous. We believe that there are a thousand factors that go into economic growth, and no single one is dispositive.

We look at the tax cuts of 2001 and do not see tremendous gains. We look at the tax increase of 1982 and do not see a ruinous disaster. We look at high deficit eras and low deficit eras and do not see an easy correlation between deficit spending and growth. On the contrary, if you look around the world there’s a slight negative correlation between government size and prosperity.

We believe that if you rest everything on a single lever (Increase deficits! Cut taxes!), you give people a permission slip to be self-indulgent. They will spend or cut to their hearts’ content and soon you’ll be facing national bankruptcy. We believe that even if you are theoretically right, your policies will be distorted by human frailties and special interests.

The people in my group (you might call us conservatives) are more likely to embrace a low and steady approach to fiscal policy. Control debt. Control entitlements. Keep tax levels reasonable and the tax code simple. Work on the economic fundamentals: human capital, productivity, labor market flexibility, open trade, saving and investment. Don’t believe you can use magic levers to manipulate growth month to month.

Well, we’ll see. Looks like the Prez and members of Congress have stalled on the budget, federal spending and job creation for such a long time that a magic lever should would be welcome.

Debt Summit: On the Table or Off?

I don’t understand why the TV networks don’t broadcast live the so-called summit at the White House Sunday night where the Prez and the head sleds in Congress are going to get together to consider how, when or if they are going to agree to increase the federal debt limit.

If nothing else, this would be great reality TV.

I would also like to see the size and shape of the table they are going to sit around. It must be huge — since everything is either on the table, or some items are on with others (like, ah, tax hikes) are off. Apparently.

On the table. Off the table. More Inside the Beltway buzz phrases like the “new normal.”

OK. Since there won’t be any live TV and the chattering class will most likely be mute until long after I’m asleep, here’s a preview provided by Fox News, “Tensions Flare Ahead of White House Deficit Summit“:

Partisan tensions were flaring ahead of a critical summit Sunday evening at the White House, where aides say President Obama plans to make one last push for a major deficit-reduction deal amid doubts on both sides.

Fox News has confirmed that the talks are still on despite a surprise announcement from House Speaker John Boehner that rattled the almost-optimistic mood surrounding the negotiations.

The speaker, claiming the White House was pushing too hard for tax hikes while not pushing hard enough for entitlement reform, said Saturday evening that lawmakers should aim for a smaller deficit-reduction deal. Instead of the $4 trillion package officials were talking about just days ago, Boehner suggested negotiators aim for a deal that would be worth about half that over the next decade.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” confirmed that a $4 trillion package is now off the table.

“Everything they’ve told me and the speaker is that to get a big package would require big tax increases in the middle of the economic situation,” McConnell told “Fox News Sunday.”

Earlier in the week, Democrats had been sparring with the White House over its perceived willingness to deal with the GOP on entitlement reform. But Boehner’s statement on Sunday turned their focus back to hammering Republicans for their insistence on no tax hikes in the deficit talks.

“All they want is to cut Medicare/Social Security and protect the rich,” a senior Democratic congressional aide told Fox News.

Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., said there must be “shared sacrifice” in any deal.

“Everything has to be on the table. But pretty quickly, my Republican colleagues said, everything should be on the table except taxes. That doesn’t seem fair,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”

On the other side, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., accused Obama of “gaming Republicans.”

“It’s hard to take him seriously here,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

The partisan recriminations cast a pall over the talks Sunday evening. After a bipartisan meeting at the White House Thursday, officials were talking ambitiously about a grand bargain — one which might cut spending, address all three major entitlements, achieve tax reform and make other monumental changes in exchange for a “yes” vote on raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling before an Aug. 2 deadline.

The fact that Republicans — those pushing hardest for spending cuts and entitlement reform — were scaling back those goals Sunday signaled the negotiations were still in a tenuous place.

White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley nevertheless said Obama will push for a big deal out of Sunday’s meeting.

“Everyone agrees that a number around $4 trillion is the number that will make a serious dent on our deficit,” Daley said. “That’s what he wants to see. … This president’s still committed to doing big things.”

Daley, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” called Boehner’s statement “unfortunate.”

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner reiterated Sunday that a failure to negotiate a package and raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2 would have “catastrophic” consequences for the economy.

However, he and other officials expressed confidence that no matter the course of negotiations, Congress will ultimately vote to lift the cap.

Wonder if it would be helpful to get Judge Judy to attend. At least maybe she could help decide what should be on or off the table.

Sigh.

Summer Vacations Without News 24/7

Well, I’m back following a two week vacation in Colorado. And I’ll admit it: I didn’t pay all that much attention to the news — or what passes for news these days. In fact, I didn’t touch a dead tree newspaper while I was gone.

So, like most these days, I followed the big and small events and happenings via BlackBerry alerts, online media sites and TV. Typical? I think so. During the few days we spent in Colorado Springs after a more extended stay in Breckenridge, I would get up early a.m. and head to the exercise room adjacent to the lobby. There sat a neat stack of newspapers available free. There sat the same stack of newspapers untouched at the end of the day. Go figure.

Anyway, for a news junkie like me, I need to catch up on a few things.

First, Casey Anthony. This story dominated the national TV news — and I really didn’t know all that much about it until I started chasing the treadmill in Colorado, forced to watch the ABC early morning show instead of Fox News. I’m not sure why there is such a national fascination with this trial other than it is as close to a reality TV show as you can get. Here’s from the NYT, “HLN Stays Focused on Casey Anthony Case.”

Second, Obama and hiding the news. It appears that the Obama administration took a page from the corporate public relations playbook and tried to slip some unfavorable news by everyone by releasing it late on a Friday afternoon prior to a holiday weekend. Woot!

Here’s from Michelle Malkin’s blog (written by Doug Powers), “Obama’s Economists: Each Job Saving or Created by the Stimulus Cost $278,000 (So Far)“:

As Jeffrey Anderson at the Weekly Standard pointed out, the White House releasing a fiscal report on the Friday before a long holiday weekend can only mean one thing: There’s not much good news in it for the White House, and, ergo, taxpayers.

Such is the case with the White House Council of Economic Advisors’ seventh quarterly report on the impact of the “stimulus”:

The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.

Mind you these are Obama’s own economists, so the report is like an employee’s performance evaluation that was filled out by the employee. The absolute truth is probably much more bleak.

Oh, boy.

And third, the story that should (but may or may not) dominate the news in coming weeks. Congress and the Prez have until July 22 to agree (or not) about hiking the debt ceiling or the nation faces the potential of default on or about August 2. Here’s David Brooks opining in the NYT and framing the position and dilemma facing Republicans, “The Mother of All No-Brainers.”

Well, I’m glad to be home and back at my post as a pajama-clad citizen journalist. But I’ll admit that I miss the blue sky, sunshine and low humidity in Colorado.

No wonder nobody sits inside there reading dead tree newspapers.

Read My Lips: No New Taxes

I wonder what George Bush the Senior thinks about the current kerfuffle Inside the Beltway over hiking the debt ceiling and the federal budget. Prez O said yesterday during his presser that additional revenue — tax increases and the elimination of certain corporate benefits — had to be part of any debt-reduction package. The Republicans said about taxes: no way.

Kind of an interesting policy and political debate with both parties heading in opposite directions.

And many of the newly elected conservative members of Congress got their tickets punched by voters back home by pledging not to raise taxes, if not cut them along with reduced government spending across the board.

George Bush the Senior as he launched his bid for the White House issued the great TV sound bite: “Read my lips, no new taxes.”

Alas, he caved — and became a one-term president.

Here’s from the NYT article “In Deficit Plan, Taxes Must Rise, President Warns“:

President Obama pressured Republicans on Wednesday to accept higher taxes as part of any plan to pare down the federal deficit, bluntly telling lawmakers that they “need to do their job” and strike a deal before the United States risks defaulting on its debt.

Declaring that an agreement is not possible without painful steps on both sides, Mr. Obama said that his party had already accepted the need for substantial spending cuts in programs it had long championed, and that Republicans must agree to end tax breaks for oil and gas companies, hedge funds and other corporate interests.

In a 67-minute news conference, Mr. Obama cast the budget battle as a tug of war between the interests of the rich — like owners of corporate jets, who he said get generous tax breaks — and those of the middle class, the elderly and children.

Directly challenging Republican leaders, Mr. Obama said, “Everybody else has been willing to move off their maximalist position — they need to do the same.”

At the same time, Mr. Obama, under assault frfom Republicans on the campaign trail for an unemployment rate that remains above 9 percent, asked voters to understand that the economic recovery would take time but said that Washington, even in its current financial straits, could still do more to help. He expressed support for extending a reduction in payroll taxes for an extra year, providing loans for road and bridge-building and approving trade pacts that could help spur exports.

While the president expressed hope for a budget deal before the government’s borrowing authority expires in early August, he scolded Republican lawmakers for putting off hard decisions until the 11th hour, saying that his daughters did not procrastinate that way with their schoolwork.

“Malia and Sasha generally finish their homework a day ahead of time,” the president said, in a tone of rising exasperation. “They don’t wait until the night before. They’re not pulling all-nighters.”

The House speaker, John A. Boehner, flatly rejected Mr. Obama’s call for new tax revenues, saying the “president’s remarks ignore legislative and economic reality.”

In a toughly worded statement, Mr. Boehner said the House would vote to raise the debt limit, as the White House has demanded, only if the administration agreed to a deal that contained deep spending cuts and no tax increases.

Oh, boy.

“Read my lips: no new taxes.”

We’ll see.

Rapture in Congress?

OK. I didn’t take the garbage out Saturday morning. And the world didn’t come to an end. Chill.

Apparently, though, some took the pending apocalypse much more seriously, making significant emotional and financial investments in Harold Camping’s forecast that the world would be kaput. Here’s from USA Today, “Apocalypse some other time“:

Camping used billboards, fliers and posters to spread the word. “I am utterly, absolutely absolutely convinced it is going to happen,” Camping said last week.

The figurative drumroll leading up to Saturday — and the anticlimactic non-event — seemed to generate more jokes than fear, Cathy Lynn Grossman reported in USA TODAY’s Faith & Reason blog. Some Rapture believers expressed shock when the end did not take place.

Robert Fitzpatrick, a doomsday believer and retiree who sank almost all he had — $140,000 — into warning fellow citizens about the impending end, told the New York Daily News he did not understand what went wrong.

“I can’t tell you what I feel right now,” Fitzpatrick, 60, said Saturday in New York’s Times Square, after Armageddon failed to happen. “Obviously, I haven’t understood it correctly because we’re still here.”

Wow. He would have been better off giving the cash to my “wealth adviser” at Merrill Lynch. Then he would experience a financial Armageddon. Oops. I digress.

I wonder if there are any parallels between Saturday’s nonevent and the doomsday message from Inside the Beltway about what will happen if we do — or don’t — raise the federal government’s debt limit.

According to estimates, the U.S. government is expected to hit the $14.294 trillion debt ceiling today. Gulp. Or not. Here’s from the online version of the WSJ, “As Debt Limit Reached, Agreement Still Far Off“:

The U.S. government is expected to hit the $14.294 trillion debt ceiling Monday, setting in motion an uncertain, 11-week political scramble to avoid a default.

The Treasury Department said Monday it will stop issuing and reinvesting government securities in certain government pension plans, part of a series of steps designed to delay a default until Aug. 2.

The Treasury’s moves buy time for the White House and congressional leaders to reach a deficit-reduction agreement that could clear the way for enough lawmakers to vote to raise the amount of money Congress allows the nation to borrow.

Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, said reaching the debt ceiling “should be a warning bell to the political system that it’s time to get serious about preserving our full faith and credit.” The Obama administration says a default would tip the U.S. back into a financial crisis.

But the pathway to a deal remains unclear, even to those doing the negotiating. The White House and Republicans are giving conflicting signals about how close they are to a deal. Vice President Joe Biden said last week the contours of an agreement were taking shape. House Speaker John Boehner painted a different picture Sunday, saying on CBS’s Face the Nation “I’m not seeing any real action.”

Many Republicans and some Democrats have said they won’t vote to increase the debt ceiling without an accompanying deal to cut spending or tackle such longer-term fiscal problems as health-care costs. They argue the debt ceiling is a good venue to force changes needed to help secure the nation’s solvency.

With all the talk — from both sides of the aisle — about a financial apocalypse, wonder why there isn’t any fire with all the hot air? Here’s from Sen. Tom Coburn, opining in WaPo, “Why is the Senate stalling on the debt debate?“:

Our country is facing the greatest threat to our freedom and future since 1941. Any honest view of our debt, deficits, size of government and demographic challenges shows we must make major changes if we are going to pass on the American way of life to our children. Each week seems to bring new warning signs: slower-than-expected growth (already as much as 25 to 33 percent every year, some estimate), higher-than-expected unemployment numbers, admonitions to get our act together from the international financial community.

If these facts are true — and very few policymakers deny them — why has the U.S. Senate become the least deliberative “greatest deliberative body” in the world?

The lack of leadership and initiative in the Senate is appalling. As of this week, the Senate has held just 72 roll call votes this year, about one per legislative day on mostly noncontroversial and inconsequential matters. By this time last year, we had taken more than twice that number of votes (152). By this time in 2009, we had taken 192 votes. If we continue to avoid tough choices, we will lose control of our economic destiny and go down in history as the Senate that lost America. Our epitaph will read: Never before in the field of legislating was so much ignored by so many for so long.

For the past several months I have been meeting with a small group of senators from both parties, informally known as the Gang of Six, that was designed to force the idle — not gridlocked — Senate, and then the House and the president, to enact a long-term deficit-reduction package. Our talks reached an impasse this week when, in my view, it became clear we would not be able to produce a balanced, specific and comprehensive deal that would improve on, and in some ways meet, the standard set by the Bowles-Simpson plan.

I understand the disappointment, and real danger, associated with our impasse. The question, though, is not how we tried and failed but why the Senate has not even tried. Commissions and “gangs” form when members lose confidence in the institutions in which they serve. Working groups have their place — but they should support, not replace, the open work of the full Senate. The truth is that we already have a permanent standing debt commission. It’s called Congress.

Well, I expect that as with all issues Inside the Beltway, there will be a resolution of the debt limit at the very last minute — with both sides pointing the finger of blame at the other.

In the meantime, when members of Congress constantly shout that the world is coming to an end, all I can do is say: chill.