A Bunch Of Supercommittee-Failure Chickens Coming Home To Roost

Failure has consequences! And finally the GOP is starting to talk about tax increases!

Ultimately, it all depends on how much we want to pay for our huge military. You can't have a huge military without either a huge deficit or huge taxes:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on Monday suggested replacing the $600 billion in automatic defense cuts set to begin in 2013, even if Congress must do so one year at a time.

The defense cuts are looming as half of the $1.2 trillion sequestration that will kick in because of the failure late last year of the congressional deficit “supercommittee” to agree to a deficit-cutting plan.

...Cantor told reporters Monday that he wanted to try to find at least enough in offsets to restore the $60 billion in defense cuts set to take effect next year. He acknowledged that finding cuts to replace the entire $600 billion, spread out over 10 years, would be difficult, given the failure of deficit talks through 2011.

...The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), has already introduced legislation to undo the defense cuts, and has suggested that raising taxes would be preferable to allowing the sequester to go forward. McKeon later walked back those comments, stressing the need for cuts to entitlement programs.

President Obama’s Defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has warned that the across-the-board Pentagon cuts could damage the military, coming on top of $450 billion in reductions that the Defense Department is already planning to implement. Yet the president has threatened to reject any effort to undo the automatic cuts that is not part of a deficit-reduction deal that includes additional tax revenue.

...Cantor has spoken out against the automatic defense cuts since shortly after the supercommittee failed, but his push for replacing them piecemeal, if necessary, is consistent with his skepticism that major legislative compromise is possible before the November election.

“I’m hopeful that we can actually do something this year along those lines. I am also mindful of where we’ve been the last year,” he said in a reference to the repeated attempts on a deficit “grand bargain” that collapsed in the face of the wide ideological chasm over taxes and entitlement programs.