Yesterday, Jonathan Bernstein posed a good question:

If my twitter feed is any indication, everyone is still focused on the Joint Select (Super) Committee, which is still unlikely to do anything, which will in turn trigger something that won’t happen for another year, except by then it won’t happen.

Meanwhile, as far as I can tell the real budget news continues to be the likely shutdown showdown over FY 2012 appropriations, coming later this month…

…I’m entirely baffled by the whole thing; it just seems to me that the press has this entirely backwards … As far as I can tell, the JSC just isn’t a very big deal, while the other track — FY2012 appropriations — is a real and serious battle. That’s what I’ve been saying, and I think Stan Collender has been mostly saying the same thing, but everyone else seems to be fixated on the wrong thing. Anyone have a good explanation?

Let me take a crack at this. Five general points:

1. The Joint Committee is potentially a huge deal. First, I should say that I’m with Bernstein in thinking that the JSC, as structured and incentivized, is highly unlikely to lead to much in the way of substantial legislation. As such, I think the action on the FY12 appropriations will probably be more consequential. But the theoretical significance of the JSC process is massive; its capacity for change (again, in theory) is far greater than the likely path of the annual appropriations process. And that means that even if the probability of the JSC process producing anything is tiny, the ramifications of that small chance might make it worth focusing on. Put it this way: if there’s a 2% chance that the JSC process produces (1) major alterations to entitlement spending; (2) sweeping tax reform; and (3) huge cuts to defense spending, then that 49-to-1 bet might be more worth focusing on than an annual appropriations process that is 3-to-1 to crash into a shutdown. And it will be imperatively more worth focusing on if you are singularly concerned about a policy potentially in the JSC crosshairs (i.e. AARP re: Medicare).

2. Even if the JSC process fails, how it fails is of potentially huge political significance. Even if the JSC process does nothing as a matter of policy, it’s going to have a political effect, and a potentially large one. Therefore, political actors have a large incentive to attempt to manage that failure and maximize the benefits (or minimize the damage) from it. Bernstein seems to think it’s unlikely the committee will do anything. I think that’s possible, maybe even likely, but I think it’s also plausible that the failure will come on the chamber floors. If the JSC is to a large degree just a proxy for the four-corners  leadership, and those leaders think either that a deal is actually possible or they all think that they can win the politics of floor failure, then you might see something crash at a later stage. That would be intensely politically consequential. But no matter where this fails, it will need to be managed. Lack of output does not equal lack of winners and losers. And the groundwork for not losing  is making sure that the JSC was a high-focus, high-priority item for each party, lest they be open to the charge of never giving it a chance.

3. Many political actors have incentives to be optimistic about JSC, but not Approps. This follows somewhat from the last point. The BCA was created by Congress to solve a problem; they probably need to believe it can work, or at least not completely crash. There are at least some negative political ramifications if its fails, at least for one party or the other, and maybe for both. Even if they don’t actually believe it can work, the JSC-process is probably a huge lobbying and fundraising winner, so there are reasons to keep up appearances. As Bernstein notes, however, a failure by the JSC process isn’t particularly substantively damning in the short run; it will potentially create political winners and losers, but mostly will set sail a new politics of sequester-avoidance. The clock is ticking, but it’s a long clock.

Appropriations, on the other hand, is structured exactly the opposite: there’s a short clock with concrete ramifications waiting just around the corner, built into a process that neither side specifically created and, in fact, most agree is at least half-broken. This encourages a focus on the doom-and-gloom, for two reasons: first, all the bargaining leverage is in convincing the other side that a shutdown will hurt them more, and hurt them immediately. Second, the external gains from lobbying/fundraising/etc are, unlike the JSC situation, drawn from pretending that the process will fail. So, in the end, you have a world where the political actors overstate the probability of JSC success and understate the possibility of appropriations success.

4. A shutdown might look relatively benign these days, and less likely. Relatively-speaking, that is. After battling out the debt limit earlier this year, and standing in the face of fiscal collapse in Europe, the prospect of the funding gap for a few days in the federal government probably doesn’t seem nearly as high-stakes as it did in, say, 1995. I don’t think that’s true at all; a shutdown is pretty catastrophic. But I can see why it looks more and more like small beer to a lot of people. Plus, the appropriations process is not completely stalled right now. It’s actually moving in the Senate. In and of itself, that doesn’t make it any more likely to not trigger a shutdown. But it helps frame the viewpoint of observers that are used to very few bills moving through the Senate.

5. There are institutional media factors driving JSC-process coverage. The JSC is both easy to cover, and sexy to cover. It’s new, it’s different, and it’s promising a lot. The appropriations process, on the other hand, is complex to cover, old, and anything but sexy. Even if it succeeds, it doesn’t do anything that will light the newsstands on fire. That can’t possibly compete with something dubbed the “supercommitte.”

So where does this leave me in regard to Bernstein’s question — why are people fixated on the supercommitee?

Well, I think the answer is a mix of two things: first, the JSC-process is probably somewhat more  important than he suggests, especially in that it’s failure will be important politics. This is, of course, something a self-fulfilling prophecy; the extended media coverage has helped create the public illusion of greater probable success, which in turn will intensify the politics of failure. Conversely, I think the appropriations process is somewhat less important, mostly because I rate the probability of shutdown somewhat lower than Jonathan. And that’s in part because of the existence of the JSC; it strikes me that a shutdown now would have cross-contamination politically. The loser of the shutdown might very well be blamed for the failure of the JSC. And that raises the brinksmanship, which in turn I think increases the possibility someone caves. So that’s a substantive reason.

Second, I think a lot of observers are largely ignorant of the true probabilities and true consequences of success and failure in both cases. At the voter/observer level, people want to believe in big solutions to big problems and the basic ability of democratic governance to, if not solve all problems, at least avoid all disasters. I know I have to fight that urge constantly.  At the political actor level, there are a myriad of incentives for either a genuine or strategic optimism that feeds this public belief, and in any case there are self-interested incentives to prioritize and promote the special device developed to solve the big problem. I’m not a big fan of traditional arguments about press incentives, but they certainly exist too. Besides all the ones mentioned above, the press can’t ignore, day after day, everything the political actors say. And the political actors are certainly rating the JSC chances much better than Bernstein, Stan, or I do.

So, I guess I’m less baffled about the press/observer focus than Jonathan, but that doesn’t make me any less worried. I still don’t see a lot of hope for the JSC process. The whole thing reminds me of how Potter described Buchanan’s plan to solve the secession crisis in his final annual address in December 1860 — that in proposing a constitutional amendment, he had raised the stakes and elevated the process, but had done nothing to change the underlying dynamics of the situation.