The super committee deadline will come and go and it will feel like nothing more spectacular than a passing breeze that comes, rustles the leaves a bit and then moves on unnoticed. The clowns in Washington not being able to even sit at the same table, let alone agree on anything will affect many things, however. People are confused and have nowhere to go, or do they?

Financial collapse is not far away. How long can any civilization survive living paycheck to paycheck? Because the politicians cannot put the good of their fellow man ahead of their own little agendas, America will suffer silently.

Places like New York are going to really get slapped. It appears that New York raises politicians that care intensely about their people. Mr. Bloomberg, the major of New York and the Governor of New York state are expecting major job losses. People don't realize that if this super committee doesn't come to a final resolution, all kinds of automatic programs go into effect.

Mayor Bloomberg expects billions of dollars to be cut off to the area for which he is responsible. There will be hundreds of thousands of jobs lost.

Funding for many specialty schools will be cut off like a rubber band snapping under too much stress. Schools for poor kids will be the first hit as are schools for disabled children. The most needy will become more needy.

Physical infrastructures like bridges, sewers and road will be put on the back burner even more than they are now. When you are given a choice between putting a crust of bread between your teeth or having smooth pavement for the car you can't afford, food wins out every time.

Waste is everywhere, but maybe a good thing to come out of all this will be for many to start looking really hard at saving energy and so forth. I don't want to sound like a hippie of the 60's and say that we should all live in 20 dollar houses made of bales of straw, but there are many ways for all of us to make much better use of what we have.

Things are all relative, of course. There are hundreds of millions of people in this world that would kill to have the chance to live like our poorest. Such is the abundance we have. We could do so much more with what we have and now we are playing with financial collapse. How much poorer can we get before the police start finding bodies on the street every morning like they do in Calcutta?

It would all begin, however, with the people with big paychecks in Washington starting to think of the people who pay them those checks and putting their welfare first. This would pave the way for society to keep the level of living we have while actively pursuing new technologies to make what we have go so much further.

Poor kids could get educated and the disabled would have a chance. Not just the kids need an education. How many adults can knowledgeably answer the question: what is renewable energy and how is it generated?

What we need are politicians willing to rush into the burning building of our society to rescue us despite the apparent political danger to themselves. Do such brave men and women exist? Yes.

In conclusion, the super committee deadline will go down in history as another white elephant. Perhaps we could learn to heat some homes with all the natural gas coming out of politicians' mouths.