Last week the debt super-committee met for the first time. The panel of twelve lawmakers tasked with finding trillions in deficit cuts is carrying unprecedented responsibility – and faces unprecedented pressure. As special interest groups lobby to keep their funding, others push for cuts across the board. For the super-committee to be effective, it must put aside personal politics and focus on controlling the country’s spending addiction and ultimately reducing our debt burden.

But in its quest to reach the intended goal, the committee apparently isn’t getting very creative. Politico reports:

With just 10 weeks to figure out how to slash $1.5 trillion, the bipartisan panel of 12 lawmakers seems more content to flip through a menu of old options, recycling proposals from bipartisan groups and commissions that have come before it.

“It wouldn’t make sense to try to reinvent the wheel,” California Rep. Xavier Becerra [said]…

“We can take a lot of the good work that was done by any of these commissions and groups to give us a set of ideas which we can work off of,” he said.

Never mind that Congress has enacted none of those plans. The supercommittee has little time to act.

While there are certainly good ideas in other deficit reduction plan, as Politico points out, it doesn’t drum up much confidence when you consider how much progress other plans have made.

Meanwhile, a chorus is building around pushing the super-committee beyond its required $1.5 trillion in cuts. If the President is able to push the White House’s $447 billion jobs plan through Congress, the calls for additional cuts will surely intensify.

According to the New York Times:

[P]ressure is building on the new Congressional committee on deficit reduction to “go big” — beyond its mandate to shave as much as $1.5 trillion from budget shortfalls over 10 years — even as doubts remain about the panel’s ability to find enough bipartisan agreement to meet even the original goal.

A group of at least 57 prominent business executives and former government officials have signed a petition in support of a greater deficit reduction, which they are to release at a news conference on Monday. Among them are former treasury secretaries, budget directors and economic advisers to eight presidents from Richard M. Nixon to Mr. Obama; former Congressional leaders; and executives of top companies.

Their letter reflects a broad sense of urgency in both parties, and among economists and businesses, that the nation must put in place long-range measures to shrink future deficits. At current spending levels, those deficits are expected to balloon over the next decade as the population ages and as health care costs rise.

“We urge you to ‘go big,’ ” they wrote, “and develop a large-scale debt-reduction package sufficient to stabilize the debt as a share of the economy.”

Generally that level is estimated at $4 trillion in deficit reductions over the decade…

This would be a tall task for a panel operating in a vacuum. But the super-committee is working in a political reality that is stuffed with lobbying firms who work for clients that have deep pockets. And these lobbyists are working harder than ever to preserve funding for special interests.

Politico explains:

When it comes to a lobbying strategy for the supercommittee, K Street has a new plan: use Main Street.

Lobbyists and trade groups are turning to companies in the hometowns and states of supercommittee members to put a local face on their causes, which includes protecting oil and gas incentives and corporate accounting rules.

The trend is a reminder that even in the high-stakes world of the deficit-slashing supercommittee where national priorities might be set — politics is still local.

“In this day and age, members of Congress don’t want to listen to people on K Street as much as they want to listen to their own constituents who are engaged every day in trying to make it,” said Judith Thorman of the International Franchise Association.

Maybe the super-committee can learn a lesson from K Street – be creative, adaptable. The problems our economy faces are unprecedented. The solution must also be.

BA