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Yet no one is talking about the most obvious trigger of all — no budget cuts until the official level of unemployment falls to 5 percent, its level before the Great Recession.

The biggest trigger on the minds of Washington insiders is $1.2 trillion across-the-board cuts that will automatically occur if Congress’s supercommittee doesn’t come up with at least $1.2 trillion of cuts on its own that Congress agrees to by December 23.

That automatic trigger seems likelier by the day because at this point the odds of an agreement are roughly zero.

Here’s the truly insane thing: The triggered cuts start in 2013, a little over a year from now.

Yet no one in their right mind believes unemployment will be lower than 8 percent by then.

The cuts will come on top of the expiration of extended unemployment benefits, the end of a payroll tax cut, and continuing reductions in state and local budgets — all when American consumers (whose spending is 70 percent of the economy) will still be reeling from declining jobs and wages and plunging home prices. Even if Europe’s debt crisis doesn’t by then threaten a global financial meltdown, this rush toward austerity couldn’t come at a worse time.

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Wired's Spencer Ackerman reports from the Army's "Unified Quest" event, in which the Army "holds a series of wargames and symposia to help it think about its needs for the near future." Its needs generally include funding that matches or exceeds current levels.

We are, of course, currently drawing down from one of the multiple wars we're fighting, making it harder to justify maintaining such a large Army, but the Army is basically convinced that the world is heading for a disastrous post-apocalyptic hellscape scenario:

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Jim VandeHei and famous email newsletter author Mike Allen are spearheading the campaign (which has already been unfavorably reviewed by CJR). Here, they explain why America was crying out for Politico Primary:

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Steve Schwarzman, chairman and CEO the Blackstone Group, a private-equity behemoth, made waves this week with a Financial Times Op-Ed that, on the surface, drew parallels to Warren Buffett's August tax-hike manifesto, "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich." We decided to take a closer look at the Schwarzman piece to see if we could glean his position on the Challenge.

Though the essay is titled "An Olive Branch to Obama: I Will Share the Pain," Schwarzman actually skirts the issue of his own tax burden. He does argue for "shared sacrifice," but also says eliminating the deficit cannot be achieved by "just raising taxes on the wealthiest two per cent." (It's worth noting that these two points, taken together, bear some resemblance to the cries of critics who believe the bottom 50 percent of income earners don't pay their fair share of taxes.) And, as far as prescribing actual policy, the only solution the Blackstone CEO suggests is a flat rate -- which happens to have the flavor of a regressive tax plan.

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Think Progress links to the words of NOAA administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco:

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I can explain the magnitude of the federal debt pretty easily: The recession caused revenue to plummet, and tax rates have been very low for years. Plus wars. But I explained that with words. Who reads words? No one, unless those words have lines next to them, or colored bars.

The New York Times made a chart blaming Bush for the debt, and it was so popular that it made another one that added a line explaining whom we owe the debt to. (Ourselves, mostly.) The White House made a chart that was basically the New York Times chart but with Bush's additions to the debt in red, for Republicanness. (Though a lot of it was gray, for "no one's fault, really, debt just happens.")

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Bolton, the former U.N. envoy too war-loving even for the Bush administration (they sent him to the U.N. purely because appointing a psychopath ambassador was a good way to prove their utter contempt for the institution), is concerned that the deal could hypothetically involve defense budget spending reductions "as much as three percent below" our current $700 billion defense budget, which has grown by around 9% annually for a decade.

Depending on the outcome of further negotiations over the size and allocation of those reductions, these cuts alone may well be quite harmful. The best that can be said is that, for these fiscal years, the issue is still unresolved.

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The Chicago Sun-Times has a big story on the Tea Party Freshman -- who is on TV 100 times a day shouting about how we need to balance the budget -- and the $117,437 he owes his ex-wife, which she has been attempting to collect for years.

You know how bad pundits and annoying politicians like to pretend the Federal government is like a household when they talk about how we need to balance our books? If we take that flawed analogy seriously, it does not really make a lot of sense to trust the budget to someone Joe Walsh, a private sector failure who is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, whose condo was foreclosed on, and who is unable to make his child support payments. On a six-figure salary! And he's dumb enough to pay for his health insurance out of pocket instead of getting it through his workplace -- with a wife with a preexisting condition -- to prove some inane point. Meanwhile, while he was semi-employed and not paying his ex-wife for his children's expenses, he was apparently going on multiple foreign vacations. And he loaned his congressional campaign $35,000. This guy's horrible at budgets and living within his means! He should not be allowed anywhere near debt ceiling negotiations! (The Joe Walsh Balanced Budget Act: Don't pay any of your creditors and spend most of your time arguing with Chris Matthews.)

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Bush's tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are the obvious big-ticket items. The tax cuts, in particular, are the structural-deficit-gift that keeps on giving. As the New York Times observes, if all of the Bush tax cuts "expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels."

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Boun, the guy who laughed when a town hall attendee asked, "Who's going to shoot Obama?" and the guy who compared healthcare reform to "the war of Yankee aggression," and the guy who refused to sit with a member of the Democratic Party during the last State of the Union and chose instead to angrily tweet from his office throughout the entire thing, has come up with a plan so brilliant in its simplicity that I'm astounded that some other teabagging good ol' boy troll congressman didn't come up with it first: Lower the debt ceiling.

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Rumors emerged Tuesday evening that a significant extension of the deadline on raising the debt-ceiling was to be announced, shifting the date from Aug. 2. to later that month.

"I have simply heard that they may be announcing that they can expand this to a later time in August. As I said that wouldn’t be surprising to me," Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) -- and member of the stalled Biden budget talks -- told The Hill. Indeed, and extension would give more time for the deficit talks to be resumed and resolved.

Politico emphasizes Wednesday (based on comments from Treasury spokesperson Colleen Murray), that the deadline extension will at most be only a few days later than initially expected.

What is more certain is that in early July, the Treasury will issue a revised estimate of when the exact deadline will be. The Aug. 2. deadline was tied to a a $23 billion Social Security payment due on August 3., but is likely to be marginally extended.

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Addressing Ohio Democrats, Biden said there had been great progress in talks with Republican lawmakers on a deficit-reduction plan agreement. But he insisted that his party wouldn't agree to cuts that would undermine the elderly and middle-class workers.

"We're not going to let the middle class carry the whole burden. We will sacrifice. But they must be in on the deal," Biden said in a speech at the Ohio Democratic Party's annual dinner.

Biden led efforts on a deficit-reduction plan but Republicans pulled out of the discussions last week, prompting President Barack Obama to take control of the talks.

The sides disagree over taxes. Democrats say a deficit-reduction agreement must include tax increases or eliminate tax breaks for big companies and wealthy individuals. Republicans want huge cuts in government spending and insist on no tax increases.

On tax breaks for the wealthy, Biden used the example of hedge fund managers who "play with other people's money."

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The White House meetings, announced Friday by press secretary Jay Carney, would seek to pick up where negotiations headed by Vice President Joe Biden left off. Republican negotiators abandoned those talks Thursday over Democrats' insistence on including tax increases in any deficit-reduction plan.

McConnell has been demanding that Obama become personally involved in the budget discussions.

Congressional Republicans want to reach a deal on about $2 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years before agreeing to raise the nation's borrowing limit, currently capped at $14.3 trillion. The Treasury Department has said it has until Aug. 2 before its ability to pay U.S. debt runs out.

Obama has repeatedly called for a "balanced framework" for long-term deficit reduction, saying cuts in spending are necessary but that additional tax revenue should also be part of the equation. Democrats insist that additional revenues be found by closing tax breaks, alongside the trillions of dollars in spending cuts.

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The Virginia Republican said in a statement that the Republican-dominated House simply won't support tax increases, and that he wouldn't participate in the budget meeting scheduled for Thursday. Cantor said that it's time for President Barack Obama to weigh in directly on the budget because Democrats insist on negotiating some tax increases.

A spokesman for Jon Kyl of Arizona, who's representing Senate Republicans in the talks, said Kyl would not attend Thursday's scheduled meeting either.

The moves seem aimed at drawing Obama more directly into the talks. Cantor expressed frustration earlier this week that the president had not been more involved. Whether the tactic generates hard feelings that could jeopardize an agreement remains to be seen.

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The annual wealth report from Merrill Lynch and Capgemini found that the wealth of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) reached $42.7 trillion in 2010. An HNWI is defined as someone who has more than $1million in free cash and there are now more such individuals (11 million) than ever. The 2010 figure of combined wealth of HNWIs has risen 10 percent on the 2009 number and has surpassed the previous peak of $40.7 trillion reached in 2007.

Ultra-high net worth individuals -- those with more than $30 million in free cash -- saw their investments jump over 11 percent in 2010, to $15 trillion concentrated among 103,000 people (less, even, than 1 percent of the world's HNWIs).

In terms of where to find rich people, the Guardian reports:

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Similarly, from Texas to California, state lawmakers are chopping children's health programs in the face of budget shortfalls. In all these initiatives, the rhetorical leitmotif is "fiscal responsibility."

Like clockwork, this has set off the now-standard ideological debate over values, with liberals arguing that it's immoral to deny healthcare to today's kids and conservatives countering that it's even more immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. But as highlighted by a new National Bureau of Economic Research report, both sides are ignoring the most important non-ideological fact: Any so-called deficit reduction plan that cuts child health programs is almost certain to increase deficits.

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But Coburn provides his own side of the story in an op-ed piece in today's Washington Post, and it is a masterpiece. Coburn is deeply, deeply upset that nothing ever seems to get accomplished in the Senate! "Why has the U.S. Senate become the least deliberative 'greatest deliberative body' in the world?" he asks.

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"And with the exception of tax hikes -- which will destroy jobs -- everything is on the table."

Never mind the fact that "trillions of dollars of cuts" in any accelerated time frame would "destroy jobs" much more efficiently than ending Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. And it's not even worth pointing out, again, the Republican demagoguery that portrays the statutory end of the Bush tax cuts as wild tax hikes. The speech is most useful in its demonstration of classic Washington politician projectionism: Boehner did not mention under what time frame the cuts should take place nor did he specify where exactly the cuts should come. So who, precisely, is punting the tough questions to the future?

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