The congressional committee created amid the deal to raise the debt ceiling, signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday, might be the only hope that months of political wrangling over the federal deficit improve the nation's finances.
Raising the debt ceiling prevented the unthinkable - a historic default by the U.S. government - but it did nothing to fix the long-term budget problems, which have been building for generations and still leave the nation at risk of a credit-rating downgrade.
The bipartisan committee, whose members still must be selected, will have until the end of this year to devise a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion over 10 years.
The messy political process that finally resulted in the debt-ceiling agreement managed to do nothing else, and raised an obvious question:
Will the panel, already dubbed the Super Committee, have the stomach to recommend ways to boost tax revenue and trim the sacred cows of Medicare and Social Security?
Economist Joel Naroff is waiting to see who is on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
"Are they going to be those politicians who were bitten by the rabid dogs, or are they going to be people who are reasonable?" Naroff asked. That is crucial because the committee is "where something may or may not come out of this," Naroff said.
If the 12-member committee, split between both houses of Congress and Democrats and Republicans, fails to agree on a plan, $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts will occur over a decade, including nearly $500 billion in defense cuts.
"Are they really going to want to do that? That's where the rubber is going to hit the road," Naroff said.
Bob Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors and former director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, had a less generous view of the plan signed by Obama.
For all the hand-wringing and worry around the nation's dinner tables and in financial markets, the Budget Control Act of 2011 "doesn't try to eliminate the deficit," Eisenbeis said. "All it does is try to slow the growth of the deficit over the next 10 years."
