Megan McArdle, en fuego over the supercommittee fail and what it says about our paralyzed budget politics. Excerpt:

In a modern democratic state, two things are true of any policy agenda:

1.  You eventually have to pay for it, with actual money.

2.  You have to get those bastards on the other side to agree to it.

We seem to have an electorate who believes neither of these things, and the political class has followed them.  We passed a giant health care entitlement “paid for” with cuts to existing services that should have gone towards deficit reduction, if they can be done at all . . . and with a structure that risks failing spectacularly and making everything worse if the cost projections are wrong, or the necessary changes prove politically unsustainable.  When I pointed this out, I was told “it’s not our fault if the Republicans f*ck it up,” as if it were somehow reasonable policy analysis to assume away the existence of anyone who disagrees with you.

Stop snickering conservatives: you didn’t pay for your tax cuts at all, and you tried to get through an equally enormous entitlement change (remember Social Security reform) without funding it in any way, even a stupid and likely-to-fail one.

At some level, I wonder if our legislators understand that this matters.  Sure, our debt-to-GDP ratio is only in the mid-fifties–but it was in the mid-thirties just a couple of years ago.  And the best forecasts I’ve seen have it heading into the mid-eighties in a very short time.