The SuperCommittee’s Failure and Four Great Accomplishments That Took Less Time
Unless a miracle happens, the Congressional “Supercommittee” on Deficit Reduction is set to fail it’s objective of cutting $1.5 trillion from the budget by Wednesday. And since Congress is hard at work undoing the automatic spending cuts that were supposed to be triggered, we’re basically back where we started.
No one is surprised at this failure. Even if it had worked, it would have just delayed the tough decisions until after the next election- and some say that delaying was the real goal anyway. But still, wouldn’t it have been nice to be surprised by a deal that didn’t destroy our social infrastructure, and didn’t raise taxes on the middle class?
Assuming the “start date” was Aug. 10, when the final members of the committee were announced, that’s 74 days without a compromise. Here’s a few things that took less time than that and actually got done:
1. Creating the Universe
According to the Bible, this took the Almighty six days. SIX.
[Note: Since a day is the time it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun, and since God didn't create the sun until the fourth day, those first three days may have lasted for 13.5 billion years.]
2. Creating Facebook
Surely the most important thing to happen since #1 on this list, the foundations for Facebook (in the form of an earlier site called Facemash) were supposedly coded by Mark Zuckerberg in a single night. It is still unknown if this great achievement was also accomplishment while drunk and spouting terse, rhythmic dialogue.
3. Writing On The Road
This classic of the Beat generation was written by Jack Kerouac in just three manic weeks, on a typewriter rigged to feed a constant stream of paper.
4. Declaring US Independence From England
While the US had already been in revolt for a year, the Second Continental Congress had been convened for less than two months in 1776 when they voted to officially declare independence from Great Britain. And Thomas Jefferson spent about seventeen days doing the majority of the writing for the official statement- the US Declaration of Independence.
