Everything You Need to Know About the Debt Supercommittee

As part of the last-minute compromise on August 2 that resolved the debt-limit crisis, Congress set up a 12-person Super Committee.  Officially called the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction,this committee was charged with coming up with a permanent fix for the budget and deficit problems facing the country and threatening the still-shaky economic recovery.

The idea that this Super Committee might come up with a "permanent" solution reminds me of some "permanent" solutions to other wide-ranging problems from the very early 20th century:

• World War I, the "war to end all wars."
• The League of Nations.  (And its successor, the United Nations.)

In recent years we've also seen "permanent" solutions like No Child Left Behind, which is at best partially successful and at worst an unmitigated disaster in every way.

I can think of so many ways that the Super Committee idea will fail.  All of them have to do with the inability of our elected officials to set aside their own agendas, ignore the Special Interests, be willing to compromise, work together for the common good, and act with foresight, courage and maturity.  And if it does fail, the nation will be plunged into another economic crisis, and members of the Super Committee and Congress at large will stand around, pointing their fingers and blaming everyone but themselves for the failure.

In this article, I will give you the names of the twelve members of the Super Committee, and the timetable for the Super Committee and Congress.  This is public information.  I copied it from the National Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.

Members of the Super Committee

1. Sen. Max Baucus (D) of Montana - chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which handles Medicare and tax policy.
2. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D) of California -vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus and senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee.  He voted against the August 2 debt-limit compromise.
3. Rep. Dave Camp (R) of Michigan - member of the House Ways and Means Committee.  He has a reputation as a moderate who is skilled at "working both sides of the aisle."
4. Rep. James Clyburn (D) of South Carolina -member of the House Appropriations Committee and No. 3 in the House Democratic Caucus.
5. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R) of Texas - appointed as co-chair of the Super Committee.  A "true-blue conservative" who is not known for any ability to compromise, or to work effectively with non-conservatives.  To his credit, he broke with the Republicans and didn't buy into the "too big to fail" argument during the bail-out talks of the recent Great Recession.
6. Sen. John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts - former presidential candidate, former chair of the Small Business Committee, current chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Rumor has it that he lobbied hard to get appointed to the Super Committee.
7. Sen. Jon Kyl (R) of Arizona - Senate Republican whip and member of the Senate Finance Committee.  He retires at the end of this term, so while he may be doing this to pad his résumé, he's not doing it to consolidate his power in the Senate.  He may actually help the Super Committee do something useful.
8. Sen. Patty Murray (D) of Washington - appointed as co-chair of the Super Committee.  Chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.  She probably got on the Super Committeeat least in part because she is trusted by Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
9. Sen. Rob Portman (R) of Ohio - former Representative (for 12 years) and former member of the House Ways and Means Committee, this is his first term as Senator.
10. Sen. Patrick Toomey (R) of Pennsylvania - also a former Representative (for 6 years) and freshman Senator.  Sen. Toomey has a refreshingly independent voting record:  he has voted with Democrats at times, and against his own party and the Tea Party at times, and he worked with a Democratic Senator to ban earmarks in spending bills.
11. Rep. Fred Upton (R) of Michigan - chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, with a reputation as a "moderate conservative."  He is suspected of planning to use his position on the Super Committee to further his agenda of weakening environmental protections and taking the teeth out of the Environmental Protection Agency.
12. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) of Maryland - member of the House Budget Committee.

 Timetable for the Super Committee

In a nutshell, the Super Committee has to come up with a plan for cutting the national debt by $1.5 trillion over x years.  They have to present the formal, approved-by-all-twelve-members, plan to Congress by November 23.  The House and Senate both have to vote to approve the plan by December 23.  (I guess President Obama has to sign it into law by then, too.)  If this doesn't happen, then the automatic spending cuts written into the August 2 compromise swing into action, much to the consternation of American citizens, other national governments, and banks worldwide.

Here are the details.  You know who lives in the details!


Sept. 8: The committee holds its first organizational meeting; on the agenda will be setting the rules.

Sept. 13: First public hearing, which will include testimony on "The History and Drivers of Our Nation's Debt and Its Threats" from Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf.

Sept. 22: Deadline for Congress to consider a resolution of disapproval for first $900 billion tranche of debt limit increase.

Oct. 1-Dec. 31: Timeframe in which both houses of Congress must vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment.

Oct. 14: House and Senate committees must submit recommendations to the committee by this date.

Nov. 23: Deadline for the committee to vote on a plan with $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction.

Dec. 2: Deadline for the committee to submit report and legislative language to the president and Congress.

Dec. 23: Deadline for both houses to vote on the committee bill.

Jan. 15, 2012: Date that the “trigger” leading to $1.2 trillion of future spending cuts goes into effect, if the committee’s legislation has not been enacted.

February 2012: Approximate time when the first $900 billion of debt ceiling increase runs out.

February/March 2012: During this period, 15 days after the president uses his authority in the bill to increase the debt ceiling a second time, is the deadline for Congress to consider a resolution of disapproval for the second tranche ($1.2-$1.5 trillion) of debt limit increase.

Fall/Winter 2012: The additional $2.1-$2.4 trillion of borrowing authority from this law runs out.

Jan. 2, 2013: OMB orders sequestrations for defense and non-defense categories of spending necessary to meet spending cuts required by the “trigger."



Good luck to all of us

Like the great-aunt who throws rice on the bride and groom and wishes them well, then turns around and mutters, "They'll be divorced in less than a year," I wish the Super Committee all the success in the world, but I expect them to fail miserably.  I'd love to be proven wrong on this.

A note on Kerry "lobbying hard" to get on the Super Committee:  I wouldn't be surprised if all twelve of them (and others who didn't get nominated) aspired, and pushed hard, to get onto this committee. However, I don't believe that anybody who did so, did so for primarily altruistic or patriotic reasons.  I'd love to be proven wrong on this, too.

Dear Congressman: Grow up, already

To all the members of the Congress of the United States:

You haven't learned a single thing.

The compromise upon which you settled, in order to bring an end to the debt-limit crisis and avert a larger crisis, was admirable.  We must give you credit for that.  But the acrimony, the stubbornness, and the brinksmanship which preceded the compromise were deplorable and childish.

Or, in more common language, your behavior sucks.  Your attitude sucks.  You're acting like a bunch of little babies.  If I were a private businessman, I would never hire someone like you to work for me.  If I did, you would alienate all of my customers.  My suppliers would refuse to do business with me, and my best employees would resign, all because of you.  You would ruin my business.

Immediately after the compromise became law, you ran out of town en masse for your summer break - leaving undone all sorts of important tasks that had been repeatedly deferred because of your STUPID arguing over the debt limit.  The most visible of these undone tasks was the FAA funding bill that needed closure, in order to pay air traffic controllers, repair many of the nation's runways, and generally keep air travel safe.

Once again, if you were a salaried employee at my business, I would fire you for such immature behavior.  Even teenage burger flippers are more responsible than that.  And we pay you, as senators and representatives, to get the important stuff done, not to punch a time clock.  Hourly employees punch the time clock; salaried employees stay until the job is done.  Do you not understand that?

If you don't understand that, then you've lived in Washington for too long.  It's time for you to come home permanently, and not just for the summer.

Now, traditionally, on summer break, you meet with your constituents back home.  This year, many of you are breaking with tradition and hiding from your constituents.  The number of so-called "town hall" meetings you are holding has been sharply curtailed, and many of these meetings have been replaced with invitation-only events, or events which carry an admission charge, or carefully scripted and fiercely moderated Internet events.  These events allow you (or your handlers) to control who has access to you, and what they're allowed to say to you.

In a way, I can understand the change.  On CNN and other television news outlets, we've seen video of town hall meetings and other face-to-face events in 2011, which have been hijacked by organized groups and used to promote their own narrow agendas.  Don't worry about those people.  Let them hijack the events.  The rest of us won't put up with it for long, and we'll use the power of We The People to shut down those disruptors.  But for you to attempt to hide from your constituents, and to surround yourselves with fans and sycophants, is cowardly and immature.  When we elected you, we thought you had more courage than that.

We can still vote you out of office.  And believe me, we will.  I'm surprised that none of you have faced a recall vote yet - my guess is that the inertia of the American voter is temporarily saving some of your hides.  But in November 2012, We The People will definitely make our voices heard.

And don't tell us you didn't see it coming.

Hey Gadhafi, grab a rifle, come out, and fight!

It's no surprise.  In the almost-liberated country of Libya, the almost-former dictator and supreme ruler for 42 years, Moammar Gadhafi, has exhorted his few remaining loyal citizens to grab their weapons, go out into the streets, and fight the rebels.  Gadhafi's sons have echoed their father's words, calling on the people to keep fighting.

Yet Gadhafi and Sons are nowhere to be found.  They're in hiding somewhere.

If Gadhafi and co. feel so strongly about the importance of combating the rebels, then why don't they show us how important it is?  Why don't they grab some guns, come out of hiding, and lead the charge?

I think we know why.

p.s. Every news organization spells his name differently.  They're all phonetic spellings, and none of them is "wrong".  Don't bother trying to correct mine.

Make a video game! Part Two

In my previous entry, I quoted one of the inventors of the PC as saying that the reign of the PC is over.  Well, Forbes has been saying "The PC is dead" for years now, and the PC still refuses to die.  I think what will eventually happen is that the PC will lose its cachet with household users, and go back into the office and the laboratory whence it came. But it will not die.  After all, you have to develop all those Android and iPod apps on something.

(When I say "PC," I'm including "Mac" in the mix.  Don't get your senstivities all in a twist, okay?  I'm also going to throw laptop and notebook PCs in with the desktop ones - basically, any computing device that uses a keyboard and mouse for input, and a pixellated display for output.)

The latest wrinkle in video and computer gaming is 3D gameplay.  You're all familiar with 3D movies, some recent notable ones being Tangled, Harry Potter and the Installment of Doom, and Captain America.  I only saw Tangled in 2D, although I can imagine that it was spectacular in 3D.  I saw Harry Potter in 3D, and to be honest, it didn't need it.  Don't get me wrong:  the movie was great, the 3D effects were great, but the 3D effects did not enhance the story.  The story is very well told, and it can stand on its own, without the aid of 3D.

Nevertheless, 3D cinema is here to stay.  The moviemakers are doing it right this time, and though I think it's just a recycled fad, I also think it's permanent.  As my Harry Potter experience showed, not everything needs to be 3D, but for some movies, it really makes a difference.

Now 3D is moving out of the movies and into games.  Kenneth Wong writes a thoughtful piece about it in the June/July 2011 issue of Computer Graphics World, called "Seeing Double:  Stereo 3D Moves from Cinema to Game Cinematic and Gameplay."  Okay, that's a long title, but Wong makes a good case for 3D.  He says that it's kind of clunky right now, like the original Atari 2600's sprites were kind of clunky back then, but that it can only get better with time.  The entry point for 3D gaming is "Nvidia's $149 stereo 3D kit, called 3D Vision."  Think of that!  For only a hundred and fifty bucks, you can get a glimpse into the future of gaming.  That sounds  pretty good.  (But you'll need a PC or Mac to do it.)

He quotes Mike Roush, from Gaijin Games (developers of the Bit.Trip game series) as saying '"3D is such a young medium right now. It's just going to get bigger.  Being in the first round of game deveopers to work on stereo 3D is an honor."'

Then he quotes Vernon Wilbert of Digital Domain.  Wilbert notes that every breakthrough or incremental improvement in interactive entertainment (by which Wong means "games") is, as Wilbert puts it, "a push toward the holodeck."  Star Trek fans will understand that reference.  Says Wong, quoting Wilbert:  '"It's getting you one step closer to the holodeck.  Stereo is the gateway to something else."'

Want to make a million bucks? Make a video game!

Two interesting articles appeared this month in two different publications. One was about the eventual decline of the PC, and the other was about the glowing future of 3D video games. These two articles are related, although the authors did not intend it that way.

The first was actually an entry in the "A Smarter Planet Blog" on August 10, 2011, entitled IBM Leads the Way in the Post-PC Era. This article was written by Mark Dean, Chief Technology officer of IBM Middle East and Africa, who was one of the 12 original PC designers 30 years ago (released to the public on August 12, 1981) and a driving force in IBM's PC division until it was sold to Lenovo in 2005.

Dean says:

It may be odd for me to say this, but I’m also proud IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to Lenovo. While many in the tech industry questioned IBM’s decision to exit the business at the time, it’s now clear that our company was in the vanguard of the post-PC era. 

I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing. They’re going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs. 

PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device—though there’s plenty of excitement about smart phones and tablets—but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress. These days, it’s becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact. It is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people’s lives.

It's an interesting concept, and a concept that gains currency when one looks around and sees the profusion of smartphones and tablets.  So many of the tasks that used to require PCs (including laptops and netbooks) have abandoned that dependency.  For example, it's now the custom, when one reaches the summit of one of Colorado's fourteeners (mountains higher than 14,000 feet), to pull out one's smartphone, take a self-portrait on the summit, and post it instantly on Facebook.  That used to require a digital camera, a mini-USB cable, and a PC, and it couldn't be done until the climber came down the mountain and went home.

For another example (and a good segue into the second article), I was part of the start-up of two computer game companies in the 2003-2004 era.  All of our development work was PC-based.  All of the tools were PC-based.  This made sense, because the target platforms for our games were overwhelmingly PCs. (Mac and Linux were Johnny-come-latelys in the gaming world.)  If we were still developing games today, the world would be a lot different.  Our development work could be done as easily on a Mac or Linux box as on a PC, and the target platforms would not be overwhelmingly PCs.  In the intervening years, consoles have made an incredible resurgence, with the Microsoft XBox family, the Nintendo Wii, and the Sony PlayStation family.  In a dramatic shift, more high-end games are played on consoles today than on PCs.

But the market is in rapid flux, and the consoles are now seeing their lunch money stolen by smartphones, iPods, tablets, and the completely ethereal and device-independent Internet.  Okay, so the Internet existed more than 8 years ago - even Web browsers existed more than 8 years ago - but most users did not have a high-speed connection to the Internet.  Now that has all changed.  Even the aforementioned iPods have high-speed processors and high-bandwidth connections to the Internet, which make playing online games a cinch.

How big is the game industry?  Well, it's grown immensely since I first stuck my toe in it.  In the June/July issue of Computer Graphics World (see p. 26 of the print edition), Kenneth Wong cited the following figures:

... The total console, portable, and PC game software industry generated $10.5 billion in 2009.  Of that, PC game software accounted only for $538 million. ...  Total revenues spent on games in the US reached $24 billion in 2010.  PC/Mac game downloads and retail box sales accounted for approximately 19 percent of that ($4.6 billion).  By contrast, console games accounted for close to 43 percent ($10.6 billion).  The rest was distributed among casual game portals, massively multiplayer games, social networks, and mobile devices.

Look at those numbers again.  They contain two hidden statistics, which Wong bypassed because they were irrelevant to the thrust of his article.  But they're worth noting.  First, the $10.6 billion spent on console games alone in 2010 was more than the total spent on all console, portable and PC games ($10.5 billion) a year before.  Second, that third piece of the pie which Wong lumped together as "the rest," was a not-insignificant 38 percent of game sales revenues, or $9.1 billion.

It's easy to look at the video and computer game industry and say that the pond is full, that there's no more room for the little fishies, what with big names like EA Games and Vivendi Universal swimming around.  The truth is that there's still a lot of room for the little fishies, the indie developers.  While much of the innovation goes on in the big companies, and up the road at Pixar and Lucasfilm, the indies are holding their own.  Once in a while, one of them strikes gold (Angry Birds, anyone?).  The gaming industry is still a good place to make a start.

Two companies are worth mentioning here, and I know that my readers can suggest others.

First: Nvidia.  According to Wong, Nvidia has a $149 product called 3D Vision which, when installed on your PC (hey! I guess they're not dead!), allows you to play many of your favorite 2D titles in 3D.  A list of the 2D games that work with 3D Vision is available at http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d-vision-games.html .  There's a lot more to 3D Vision than just a 2D-to-3D retrofit:  Nvidia is serious about their 3D offerings .

Second:  GarageGames.  This is the ultimate indie gamer resource, and the last refuge of the indie gamer.  GarageGames, through their Torque family of game engines (game-creation software, basically) and their user community, has done more to promote indie gamers, on more platforms, than any other company out there.

Dear Congressman: you can still be fired, you know

To all of the members of the Congress of the United States:

Remember when I told you, on behalf of millions of fed-up Americans, that if you did not resolve this debt-limit crisis by the deadline, we would fire you? Well, you're not out of the woods yet.

The President and key Congressional leaders have hammered out a compromise solution to the crisis. Nobody is happy with it, but everybody can live with it. Our recommendation, the recommendation of WE THE PEOPLE, is that ALL OF YOU ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES approve the solution. Vote for it. Pass it.

It's a real shame that you had to wait until you heard the rumblings of the granite pillars on Wall Street, as the still-fragile US economy threatened to come crashing down again, before you finally got serious about this. You know, you can give all the speeches and press conferences and interviews that you want; you can talk and talk and talk because that seems to be THE ONLY THING YOU ARE ANY GOOD AT, but all that talk doesn't solve the nation's problems - and frankly, we're tired of hearing you talk.

I listened to an interview with a member of Congress on NPR this morning, and all this politician wanted to do was talk. He didn't want to answer the interviewer's questions, and he didn't want to report on how he was participating in resolving this crisis. He just wanted to talk. He wanted to make sure we all heard his side of the story. I just wanted him to SHUT UP AND GET TO WORK.

And that's why we elected you all in the first place. Shut up, roll up your sleeves, get to work, and fix things. That's what WE THE PEOPLE are doing, and you shouldn't be any different.

Oh, one more thing, in case you missed it: we, the people of the United States, are serious about this. And we're seriously pissed. At you.

"There's no Undo button on a shredder"

There's no Undo button on a shredder.
Words said, cannot be unsaid.
Deeds done, cannot be undone.
It takes time and effort to clean up spilled milk.  Or broken glass.
Time is the ultimate independent variable.  You can't speed it up, slow it down, or make it go backwards.
The rich man and the poor man, the saint and the sinner, all get 24 hours in a day.
Some of us get more days than others, some get less.
What matters the most is what you do with the days and hours allotted to you.
And that you can live those days without needing (or wishing for) an Undo button.

Afterthoughts:
1. Undo button on a shredder?  I'm certain the CIA and former KGB can do it, but let's not complicate the poetry, okay?
2. Repentance and forgiveness, applied together, allow us to undo deeds and unsay words to a certain degree, but how many of us are smart enough to truly make use of these divine gifts?