How the supercommittee-ologists view the deficit-reduction panel

Lack of interest from the ratings agencies: Much of the supercommittee’s early urgency came from Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. Since then, it has become clear that the major rating agencies don’t much care what the committee does or doesn’t do. “At this point there is little reason to believe that either S&P or Moody’s would downgrade solely based on a failure to agree,” Goldman Sachs said in a recent analysis. “Both rating agencies have indicated that while a stalemate in the supercommittee would be negative, they expect $1.2 trillion in planned deficit reduction to materialize through automatic cuts if not through the supercommittee, so their fiscal outlook should remain unchanged.” The one exception is if the supercommittee fails and the trigger is pulled. In that case, they might act.

Lack of interest by the White House: For most of this year, the White House has thought that the surest path to President Obama’s reelection was to strike a big deficit deal with Republicans, or at least be seen trying to strike a big deficit deal with Republicans. The debt-ceiling debacle proved it wrong. The White House was unable to reach an agreement, and the sorry sight of its ineffectual efforts led it to sink in the polls. Since then, it has moved toward a more confrontational stance with the GOP, and has seen its poll numbers tick up slightly. So White House officials do not consider a supercommittee deal crucial to their chances. Perhaps that’s for the best, as the Democrats on the supercommittee think it would be harder to secure Republican support for a deal if the White House were more involved.

Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.

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A who’s who of the debt supercommittee

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 The bipartisan group faces a Nov. 23 deadline to agree on a debt-reduction plan.

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Jobs spending: Early on, liberals hoped that the supercommittee would become a vehicle for more jobs spending, either because that’s what was required for Democrats to sign off on a deal or, more optimistically, because representatives from both parties would come to see further stimulus spending as necessary. That looks increasingly unlikely. It’s still possible that a deal could include an extension of the current unemployment insurance funding and payroll tax rates, but it’s not likely that it would include much more.

2012: Ultimately, what happens in the supercommittee depends on what the two parties think will happen next year. If the consensus is that Obama is likely to win reelection, Republicans will be more open to a deal now, and Democrats will be less likely to make big concessions. If the consensus is that Mitt Romney is likely to be the next president, Republicans will see little reason to make concessions now, but Democrats might want to lock in a deal while they still control the White House. The best scenario is one in which both parties are worried about next year, and so prefer a mediocre deal now to the possibility of the other party deciding the terms later.

Twitter @ezraklein