(RALEIGH) -- John Hood of the John Locke Foundation isn't surprised that the super committee failed to come up with a plan to cut the U.S. budget deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade.

He says there's a simple reason why the group failed. "The threat, the scare was if you don't do anything, we will sequester a little over a trillion dollars cut automatically, and if I was in their shoes I'd be thinking, well, I can work really, really hard to come up with a trillion dollars in cuts of mine, or I could just let it go on autopilot. Maybe I'll just let it go on autopilot," Hood said.

Hood says he's never had very much faith in the committee getting the deal done in the first place.