Ezra Klein: "Democrats are going to lose this one. The first stage of the emerging deal<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congressional-leaders-struggle-to-work-out-bipartisan-debt-deal/2011/07/30/gIQAqdfdjI_story.html> doesn’t include revenue, doesn’t include stimulus, and lets Republicans pocket a trillion dollars or more in cuts without offering anything to Democrats in return.
The second stage convenes a congressional “Supercommittee” to recommend up to $2 trillion in further cuts, and if their plan doesn’t pass Congress, there’s an enforcement mechanism that begins making automatic, across-the-board cuts to almost all categories of spending. So heads Democrats lose, tails Republicans win. It’s difficult to see how it could have ended otherwise. Virtually no Democrats are willing to go past Aug. 2 without raising the debt ceiling. Plenty of Republicans are prepared to blow through the deadline. That’s not a dynamic that lends itself to a deal. That’s a dynamic that lends itself to a ransom. But Democrats will have their turn. On Dec. 31, 2012, three weeks before the end of President Barack Obama’s current term in office, the Bush tax cuts expire. Income tax rates will return to their Clinton-era levels. That amounts to a $3.6 trillion tax increase over 10 years, three or four times the $800 billion to $1.2 trillion in revenue increases that Obama and Speaker John Boehner were kicking around. And all Democrats need to do to secure that deal is...nothing." So Klein thinks that the Democrats may eventually win, but he misses the point. Obama did not let the Republicans get cuts; long-term debt reduction was Obama's principal goal; he thought that that would do more for the economy now and in the future than a big second stimulus. Obama's second goal was that revenues were raised enough so that essential "middle class" programs and infrastructure programs would not be cut. For entirely political reasons then he was willing to put the programs needed by the most vulnerable on the chopping block (they don't vote and playing tough with them makes a lot of Americans feel good) and to play nice with the military.
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