With 10 days left until an automatic trigger for debt reduction, the Super Committee tasked with finding a plan to get rid of $1.2 trillion in impending debt over the next 10 years may have to punt.

Six Democrats and six Republicans appointed to the panel -- itself a source of contention among colleagues and transparency advocates -- have until Nov. 23 to find the balance that will get past Congress by Dec. 23 and onto President Obama's desk. Without a deal by Thanksgiving, automatic across-the-board cuts divided between defense and domestic programs, also known as "sequestration," kick in.

"I am not giving up on getting something done. I think we still can and I am going to do everything to achieve that," said Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., one of the Super Committee members.

"In the very unfortunate event that we don't, I think it is very likely Congress will reconsider configuration of that sequestration and consider if this is the best way to do it.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has a new opinion column in USA Today in which he advocates numerous ways to balance the federal budget, one of which involves eliminate funding to Planned Parenthood.

“President Obama inherited a severely imbalanced budget, and he made it much worse. Many now question whether we can ever return to fiscal sanity, let alone fiscal strength,” Romney writes. “A point of no return may well be approaching — a decade of huge deficits could drive our principal payments and interest rates beyond our reach while starving the economy of the capital it needs to grow.”

“There are three ways to reduce spending, which combined, will achieve a fiscal turnaround of this size,” the former Massachusetts governor continues. “First, eliminate every government program that is not absolutely essential. There are many things government does that we may like but that we do not need.

A politically imperiled President Obama called on lawmakers Thursday night to approve another stimulus plan to create jobs, many for his union base, while adding about $450 billion to next year’s budget.

“I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away,” a defiant Mr. Obama told a joint session of the House and Senate. He urged lawmakers to “stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy.”

The president, whose job-approval ratings are his lowest ever, announced a package of proposals that is likely to be his last major effort to create jobs before the 2012 presidential campaign swings into high gear.

Among the proposals he outlined are extending unemployment benefits, worth about $50 billion; boosting spending on construction projects by about $100 billion; giving $35 billion to states to keep teachers on the job; and providing another round of payroll-tax cuts for workers and employers.

The Fitch Ratings agency on Tuesday affirmed its AAA credit rating for the federal government, giving the U.S. a boost just two weeks after another ratings agency marked it down for the first time in history.

“The key pillars of U.S.’s exceptional creditworthiness remains intact,” the agency said, crediting the U.S. economy’s pre-eminence and the dollar’s role as the world’s chief reserve currency. The agency also said it gives the U.S. long-term outlook a “stable” rating.

And, wading into the ongoing battle on Capitol Hill, the agency threw its support behind “an appropriately formulated balanced-budget commitment that was explicitly recognized in the budget process” — which could give a boost to the kind of balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution that Republicans are pushing but that President Obama has said he opposes...

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said he plans to move ahead with a debt-limit bill to rival a House Republican proposal that got new life Friday, as President Obama said it's time to move forward with debt-reduction legislation that can be supported by both political parties.

With the U.S. moving perilously closer to default on its loans to cover years of deficit spending, the majority leader announced his plan to cut $2.5 trillion from the deficit over a decade. At the same time, House Speaker John Boehner announced he would include a balanced budget amendment in his proposal, which appeared to earn him the support he needed from recalcitrant Republicans...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defying a veto threat, the Republican-controlled House voted Tuesday night to slice federal spending by $6 trillion and require a constitutional balanced-budget amendment to be sent to the states in exchange for averting a threatened Aug. 2 government default.

The 234-190 vote marked the power of deeply conservative first-term Republicans, and it stood in contrast to calls at the White House and in the Senate for a late stab at bipartisanship to solve the nation’s looming debt crisis.

President Obama and a startling number of Republican senators lauded a deficit-reduction plan put forward earlier in the day by a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators that calls for $1 trillion in what sponsors delicately called “additional revenue” and some critics swiftly labeled as higher taxes...

OK, so you wake up from a long drunken bender and discover that you burned through every bit of your money, raided your retirement savings and maxed out all your credit cards with debts your grandchildren will be paying for the rest of their lives. What do you do?

A) Stop spending, pay off your debts and figure out some way to never go on a drunken bender again where you spend all of your money and sentence your grandchildren to the modern day debtor’s prison.

B) Keep spending money you don’t have, apply for new credit cards and don’t do anything that would keep this from happening again for fear that it might make the credit card companies nervous about your financial stability...

The House of Representatives is considering its own plan to raise the debt ceiling today: the "cut, cap and balance" plan. Republicans who support it say it's needed policy to right the country's financial situation. Democrats say it would dismantle the government's safety net and change the nature of the country. So what is it?

Their plan, which would cut $111 billion in federal spending this year, would also set mandatory caps for federal spending as a percentage of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. Those caps would start at 22.5 percent and go down to 19.9 percent by the end of the decade and stay there for the foreseeable future. The plan would also require a balanced budget amendment be passed by the Congress and sent to the states for ratification.

Fighting back against Republican calls for greater spending cuts, President Obama said Friday that the government doesn’t need to make major changes to get its budget back on track and called for that solution to include some trims coupled with tax increases.

“Here’s the good news: that it turns out we don’t have to do anything radical to solve this problem. Contrary to what some folks say that — we’re not Greece. You know, we’re not Portugal,” Mr. Obama said at his third press conference in three weeks, using his most powerful public relations tool to take his arguments directly to voters.

Mr. Obama and congressional leaders are negotiating over whether and how to raise the federal government’s borrowing limit, which early next month will bump up against the $14.29 trillion limit set in law. The administration, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and leading business groups have all warned of major damage to the U.S.

Flattering House Speaker John A. Boehner publicly, President Obama on Monday tried to reel in the reluctant Republican House leader to support the president’s goal of a large tax increase to help reduce deficits.

“I think Speaker Boehner has been very sincere about trying to do something big,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference, just before resuming debt talks with Mr. Boehner and other congressional leaders. “I think he’s a good man who wants to do right by the country.”

But Mr. Boehner sounded Monday like a man who wasn’t about to be wooed anymore...