As of Sunday, CNN is reporting that the super committee charged with creating a compromise on budget cuts will not be able to reach a deal by its Wednesday deadline.

I suppose I could rant about how this shows a lack of effective leadership on the part of our elected officials and note my utter disappointment that it’s really coming down to this, but I think the saddest part about this situation is that I’m simply not surprised in the slightest. When the committee first started meeting in September after weeks of negotiations surrounding raising the debt ceiling, I was in no way optimistic about these talks going anywhere.

A tremendous amount of congressional Republicans have signed onto Grover Norquist’s pledge to not raise taxes under any circumstances, and Democrats are similarly wary of discussing entitlement cuts. Basically, there are no new means of revenue increases that anyone can agree upon nor are there any cuts that satisfy a majority either. When the government doesn’t take in more money or spend less money, basic math dictates that you’re not going to balance your budget.

But that’s not to say that Congress has been entirely unproductive the past few weeks. In addition to the overly broad “Stop Online Piracy Act” that I discussed in a previous column, last week Congress demonstrated a rare moment of bipartisan good faith when both houses voted to declare pizza a vegetable.

I am not kidding. Here’s the story: as Congress was debating a bill that covered subsidized meals available in school lunchrooms, they wanted to reduce the number of fatty foods on the menu as a hedge against this country’s increasingly salient chronic obesity problem. Naturally, the frozen food industry wasn’t particularly happy about this idea, so to keep lobbyists happy Congress decided that since schools have to provide a certain amount of vegetables on the menu, pizza ought to count as one of those vegetable servings. According to the nutritional value of tomato paste, two spoons of the stuff are enough to qualify pizza as a vegetable.

I don’t have a lot of memories of elementary school, but I’ll never forget the pizza they served in the lunchroom. That awkward mix of processed cheese and burnt dough could hardly be considered “pizza” in my book, so the audacity of going one step further and calling it a vegetable astounds me.

Now, you’re probably thinking right now, “How could this country’s lawmakers do something this stupid?” However, this law is actually brilliant. Think about it: most children detest eating healthy. It’s always an upward battle getting them to eat their fruits and veggies.

So if we take all the junk food that they crave and suddenly try to convince them that it’s good for them, they’ll stop eating it. Of course, by that logic they might simply stop eating anything entirely and just starve, but at least they wouldn’t be obese anymore.

Rationalizing a law like this in my mind proves difficult in light of this country’s political circumstances. If our congressional representatives can’t agree upon a working budget but can agree that pizza is suddenly a vegetable (which doesn’t even make sense because tomatoes technically weren’t vegetables in the first place), we’ve got a problem.

I don’t foresee the budget problem being resolved any time soon. The most likely situation is that Congress will change the deadline for when the automatic cuts that were passed as part of the debt compromise in August kick in and put the problem off until after the next election so representatives will be less worried about losing their seat. On the bright side, thanks to SMU’s school cafeteria at least I’m getting my daily-recommended dose of vegetables now.

Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].