A bipartisan White House commission this week announced a sweeping proposal to slash the federal deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars a year by taking aim at virtually every sacrosanct area of U.S tax and spending policy, including Social Security and Medicare, middle-class tax breaks and defense spending. But while the proposal has enough teeth to put a real dent in the mushrooming deficit, the political reality is that it has virtually no chance of passing through a divided Congress without major changes. " Mathematically it apparently works...[but] politcally, it is going to have a lot of trouble getting support from more than just the two co-chairs ," Stan Collender, a former Democratic House and Senate budget analyst and managing director of Qorvis Communications in Washington told Bloomberg News .