Does Supercommittee agreement really matter?

The Congressional "Supercommittee" is supposed to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in federal spending reduction over the next ten years by Thanksgiving or a series of automatic across-the-board cuts ("sequesters") will occur. Of course, the cuts don't come until 2013, and Congress is perfectly capable of voting not to do the cuts anyway, and probably would if it came to that. For example, there are supposed to have been automatic cuts in doctor's fees in Medicare for years now (that was a large part of the assumptions Democrats used to "prove" that Obamacare was not going to cost us any more), but each year Congress votes not to let the automatic cuts occur, so one can see how the political system works - a real "bait-and-switch".

But in typical Washington fashion, we have been hearing all sorts of alarmist reports of how bad things will be for this or that agency if the cuts occur -- unpaid soldiers and starving homeless and all the rest of the emotional tearjerkers have been rolled out. But does it really matter?

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has put out an enlightening posting entitled Federal Spending Without & With Sequester Cuts. The relevant chart is this one:

As one can see from the chart, this is all smoke and mirrors -- even with the sequester cuts federal spending still increases, and the sequester cuts make almost no difference at all!! Considering the magnitude of our debt problem (we just reached $15 TRILLION in federal debt this week!), this whole Supercommittee exercise is just political theater, just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.........