So let’s break this down. To pay for a tax cut that will hopefully increase consumer demand and help increase hiring, Republicans would – 1) fire hundreds of thousands of people, 2) freeze their pay (the opposite effect of a payroll tax cut, which operates as a wage increase), 3) put no-strings, volunteer peer pressure on millionaires to pay additional taxes (I’m sure there will be a high takeup for that), 4) means test a number of programs to ghetto-ize them as welfare, including unemployment benefits, which is particularly cruel, because once federal benefits kick in and you’ve been out of work 6 months, it doesn’t matter what you earned before, you’re in trouble.

I tweeted last night, “When bad news from Europe tomorrow makes stocks tank, and the idiots in DC blame it on Super Committee fail, could someone correct them?” Apparently, no one told the AP or Washington Post, who insist the Super Committee Fail is driving down the stock markets.

Republicans apparently just submitted a last-ditch effort to get agreement on the Super Committee. It was a $545 billion proposal, less than half of the minimum requirement to avoid all of the automatic trigger cuts. And it included $3 billion in tax increases.

For those of you scoring at home, that’s a ratio of about 181:1.

Democrats rejected it.

The deadline for the Super Committee to complete its recommendations for deficit reduction is Wednesday, November 23. Realistically, they’ve already passed that deadline, because any agreement must go to the Congressional Budget Office for scoring. I guess Monday is the real deadline for that scoring process. So they plan to work through the weekend to try and salvage something. Considering how things have gone in the previous several weeks, I don’t think the last few days will amount to much.

An article planted by Republican operatives looking to absolve their party of blame for failure on the Super Committee suggests that the rank and file are being persuaded to accept tax increases as part of an overall deal. The entire premise of the article is wrong, because it posits as a “tax increase” a deal that would cut taxes by $3.3 trillion

So this is interesting. President Obama did a set of phone calls today with Patty Murray and Jeb Hensarling, the co-chairs of the Super Committee. It included the usual platitudes about reaching a deal, a balanced approach, etc. Everything Obama has said a hundred times before. This was new, however, and I assume precipitated by the chatter that the trigger will never be pulled, that Congress will find a way to back out of the cuts, particularly the defense cuts.

A couple days ago, Dick Durbin was confronted by constituents in Illinois and forced to take a position assuring protection of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Two days later, he offered to put “entitlements” on the table in exchange for phony GOP tax proposals that benefit the rich.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has succeeded in changing the focus of Washington’s economic attention from deficit and debts to questions of economic justice and jobs. The President’s pivot to jobs hasn’t gotten a single jobs bill through Congress, but the changed conversation has killed the momentum of the Super Committee and created predictions of its failure.

You will be stunned to know that Democrats and Republicans are having trouble reaching consensus with less than three weeks to go until the Super Committee needs to make recommendations on deficit reduction.

Leaks from the Super Committee show how Democrats and Republicans are proposing to meet their debt reduction goals. The Republicans propose a minimum of tax increases versus spending cuts, and even those increases are misleading, since they’re using different baselines.