If you want the most positive spin on the debt ceiling agreement, you can choose between Jay Newton-Small and Deaniac83. Those are both good pieces that make solid arguments. I have to confess I’m a little mystified by the triggers, as they seem to offer almost no incentive to the Democrats on the SuperCommittee to make a deal. Gee, if we have a stalemate that means massive cuts to the Pentagon’s budget and downward pressure on the cost of Medicare? I’ll take that in a minute.
The deal is considerably better than what I feared, but I also think those two pieces are glossing over what a calamity this whole thing has been and what it means for the future. These are huge cuts, yet they don’t even begin to tackle our deficit. So, we’ll keep coming back to this. What we need is something equivalent to the creation of the Internet that will help us grow our way out of this fiscal sinkhole we’re in. With these austerity measures, we’re not going to be stimulating our way out of this mess. And, with Republican dominance of the Senate assured through 2014, we’re not going to accomplish much of anything that we can celebrate.
Okay I’m really confused.
This final deal takes the upcoming budget battle off the agenda by making a deem and pass run with it, non-entitlement domestic spending and Defense/Homeland security spending is all wrapped up together under the “trigger” language, the immediate cuts are things that Biden already dealt away, and the debt ceiling raise of 2013 will happen without an affirmative vote but just an opportunity for Reps to blow raspberries and expound about how much they hate it.
What, exactly, did the Tea Party get out of this that they weren’t going to get last week? Either these guys are wrong and there are some more horrible things in there that they aren’t pointing out, or this deal isn’t worse than what the Democrats had already agreed to last week in principle – better in some ways because at least we aren’t going through this nonsense again NEXT MONTH when the 2012 budget vote was supposed to come up.
Is this just a maneuver to save Boehner from himself?
better in some ways because at least we aren’t going through this nonsense again NEXT MONTH when the 2012 budget vote was supposed to come up.
Where did you see this?????
Read more:
well, look, something has to pass and Boehner doesn’t have the votes to insist on a whole lot. He’s coming begging, as I said all along that he would have to do. That’s why the deal looks better than what we’ve been discussing. But, sssh. Don’t tell the Republicans.
Sure – but I still don’t get how this is so different from what Reid proposed and McConnell shot down a couple days ago. Why the big stink if the end result is something that I KNOW the right-wing bloggers and other Tea Party folks have to be going apeshit over right now?
I mean if they’re looking at this and seeing giant Tea Party Victory where Reid’s compromise was a Tea party failure then they’re even more delusional than I’ve ever dreamed.
It’s hard to answer that because I don’t know all the details of the Reid plan. Did it deem and pass the 2012 budget?
In any case, once Boehner failed to pass his bill it was inevitable that the deal would start to get sweetened. We’re only learning how it was sweetened now.
Nobody seems to see more horrible things, but I can’t stop thinking that if America’s lone axis of evil Grover Norquist endorses it, they must be there — horrible things are Grover’s staff of life.
I think it’s because of this:
Where did you quote that from?
As PAYGO shows, nothing binds a Congress that they don’t want to be bound by except a Constitutional Amendment. So if another W comes along and wants to ram through a huge spending increase and a tax cut at the same time and he gets a majority in Congress to go along with it, it happens.
So what idiot wrote that?
Grover Norquist:
http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/01/a-victory-for-reagan-republicans/
True, but wasn’t Grover against default? I think this is their “mission accomplished” moment – declaring victory for themselves although in reality they revealed themselves to all as tantrum throwing terror-babies
Silver’s latest whip count:
R’s approve 153-87, D’s against 59-132, bill FAILS 212-219.
Nate needs to stick to his baseball cards.
Uh, he was basing it on The Hill. He had it revised before the vote another two or three times, jesus. Read the time stamp.
2011Q1 GDP should be warning enough to the ideologues who are super psyched to cut a trillion dollars worth of defense spending. Go look at the internals. You want to stop building fighter jets to send to Saudi Arabia? Yeah, so do I. Do you have a plan to replace that industrial production? Are we gonna have those workers building solar cells instead, or are they off to go work at McDonalds?
I expect a rainbows-and-puppies site like TPV to ignore the fact that the economy has zero expansive growth potential short of a second housing bubble, but every decision the government has made, is making, and will make since the recession has to be framed by how it creates sustainable gains in the economy that make their way to workers. If your plans don’t seem to do that, then I don’t really care about who “wins” on triggers and blue ribbon commissions and whatever else stupid bullshit Washington comes up with to avoid having to do their fucking jobs for real.
I have always said that cutting defense is only one half of the equation. We need to replace that money with infrastructure spending. That said there is quite a bit that can be cut from defense that is waste. What we play contractors like XE for example
We know our economy is heavily leavened with waste and fraud and unsustainable practices. We also know that it is performing below potential already. Fixing the former is great, but it’ll do nothing for the latter.
Everybody should want to build schools and not bombs, but if you stop building bombs without building more schools with the savings, then you have neither schools nor bombs.
Goals that were made in the last decade might not be applicable in this one. We shouldn’t want to cut military investments, we should want to divert military investments to more socially productive and humane ventures.
If you have to commit to austerity, then it’s certainly the best of bad options, but it doesn’t come without macroeconomic consequences.
“$350 billion (almost half of these cuts) in cuts in the base defense budget – these are not simply the savings coming from winding down the wars. This actually cuts the base defense budget.”
I have to admit I wasn’t aware of this and it’s good news.I feel a bit better reading the rest of it.
Another thing to be happy about is the Bush tax cuts are still set to expire. Depending on who you believe, we were offering to negotiate those away; whether that was kabuki or serious, I’m glad it didn’t happen. I still don’t trust the administration to not bargain them away the next time Republicans find a hostage, but I can hope. They’re the one remaining card we have, and I’m glad we still have it.
When Bush proposed the tax cuts, economists like Krugman warned they were backloaded and reckless, sure to cause a crises after they were set to expire. That was back when a Republican was President and so deficits did not matter. Surprise, it turns out people like Krugman were correct. The rational thing would be to start by not renewing them; the premise they were sold under, that government had plenty of money and so owed everyone a refund, has turned out to be a lie, after all. I’m pessimistic this will happen; I don’t think it’s something the President wants. But perhaps the extreme intransigence of Republicans will finally convince Democrats we need a similar intransigence of our own to get things done. We can hope.
One thing you have to remember is that they will run out in December 2012. The GOP can’t make a huge crises about it in the middle of a presidential election, unless they want to make the election a referendum on the bush tax cuts, which I would not put past them.
Thing is, if Obama loses how are the GOP going to pressure him to extend them again? And if he wins, same difference. How are the GOP going to manufacture a crises in the lame duck?
Barring a global economic meltdown or a new war, I expect 2012 to BE an referendum on the Bush Tax Cuts. Because the Bush Tax Cuts – and actually deepening the Bush Tax Cuts – is the only thing a Republican can run on and use as a “jobs program”. And the 2012 election is going to be an election based on “how shitty am I feeling about the economy”.
The Republicans absolutely want to make 2012 a referendum about the Bush Tax Cuts – because if they win they get to claim a “mandate” to permanently extend them and if they lose then they will do what Republicans always do – insist that their pet issue was not the reason for the loss but that instead they only lost because too many minorities voted for the President and that makes him illegitimate.
Win-win for Republicans all the way down.
Wow, this actually looks pretty good.
Despite all the talk, total cuts to non-defense spending is a merely $5 B TOTAL in FY2012 and 2013.
After that, there are spending caps, but of course, these can be completely ignored by any future congress.
The budget for FY2012 is deemed PASSED, so we don’t have to go through this again in 2 months.
We might actually get significant reductions in the defense budget. AND the cuts to medicare providers are hitting folks who mostly donate to republicans, giving them a strong incentive to consider some other option (like closing tax loopholes). Deniac writes: “As a matter of fact, both big triggers (Defense and Medicare provider cuts) are triggers for the Republicans!”
Well, we’ll see if this analysis holds up. But given what we’ve observed in previous negotiations, it would not surprise me if this is basically correct: the deal may be better than we believe.
Two things could happen next year that would make this a pretty good deal, in that the worst of it could be mitigated or reversed: A Dem majority in the House and a Dem Senate that finally dumps the filibuster for once and for all. Sadly enough, the former is more likely than the latter. But if we yet again allow a brat minority to control the Senate, we’re just asking to start this whole sordid drama all over again.
What do you make of the fact that the final deal can’t be filibustered, or amended? Does that mean it will only need 50 votes to pass?
Kos doesn’t believe Bush tax cuts will be rescinded at all:
Getting rid of Bush tax cuts…won’t happen
code will be simplified.
I suspect the code will be rewritten and the Bush tax levels will become irrelevant.
Sorry, I disregard “The People’s View” sight unseen. I cannot take them as seriously as they take themselves.
As an additional note, I can’t see why anybody of any political persuasion would actually be motivated to vote for this piece of shit.
It’s a bill that’s alleged to “help the economy” and “cut the deficit” that doesn’t actually do either of these things. And for the whopping zero problems it solves, it creates half a dozen new ones. Classic Washington.
I’m not sure it’s gonna pass today.
All the GOP needs for a blank check is one quisling Democrat. Kent Conrad, who is retiring, or Mark Warner, who is getting fitted for an elephant costume, are likely suspects. Conrad’s the guy who got us into this mess in the first place.
After looking at the details, it is really a draw in the short-term. It does not anything to improve nor destroy the economy in the short-run. It allows the system to function (government, debt) in ex-change for extremely awful concession in the long-run. So, it avoids any other bomb until the election.
The real damage is purely long-term. It is about dealing with terrorists, it is about “Democrats cutting Medicare” (despite being exactly the place when it must be cut) and overall, it is about a Senate who will use the debt ceiling in 2013 to prevent any reversal of the 2014-2016 huge spending cuts because Obama ” has not the guts to take a fight”.
I bet there will be no unemployment benefits or payroll tax, and they will exchanged for an extension of the Bush tax cuts.
I think Republicans have all the tools now to destroy the US Social Safety Net with the help/powerlessness of Democrats. And this is the really scary, huge piece of S*it, stuff.
A pleasure
Alternative energy is struggling along, but it is being strangled in the crib by lack of financing and cuts to some key government infrastructure parts of the system. Also to the GOPs offshore drilling instead of wind farms effort in coastal states, most likely coordinated by ALEC.
Unless you’re assuming the dems lose the senate next year, Republican dominance of the Senate is assured only if the Dems yet again refuse to do their damn job and get rid of the filibuster at the start of the next session. Aside from their bloated self esteem, there’s really no argument to keep it in any recognizable shape. To my mind, this is where the grassroots pressure should focus, because it’s the core of the Senate’s utter worthlessness and hence the engine that drives the “kill the government” meme.
The “new Internet” comparison is telling. The Net’s early days were overwhelmingly made possible by government research and development around the world, which was then commercialized by “free enterprise”. Similar story with open-source software, which was the creation of nonprofiting creators working cooperatively, and was then taken up as a profit source by business. Now open-source runs the servers of outfits like Google, Amazon, the London Stock exchange, and around 98 of the world’s fastest 100 supercomputers.
Those examples should be a lesson to all the yappers on all sides who so endlessly bleat about how we just have to give away more money to corporations if we want to develop new technologies and create real economic growth. The truth is, large corporations rarely create much of anything important — their strength is exploiting the work of others. And yet we’ll keep hearing the united chorus of “free enterprise” bullshit sung by everybody from Norquist to Obama to Robert Reich.
If we’re getting through this with only $7 billion in cuts on next year’s budget, and no shutdown in the fall, I’m having a hard time getting too upset about this deal. In exchange for not getting revenues, the Democrats get about the most favorable distribution of cuts they could, both in terms of time (heavily backloaded) and programs (lots of defense cuts).