Must Resist Urge to Beat My Head With a Stick....

Debt Ceiling compromise news looks very depressing.  Reports say negotiators are getting close to a deal, which is better than default I guess, but a lot worse than a clean Debt Ceiling increase.  The terms as reported by Jon Cohn:

- A debt ceiling increase of up to $2.1 to $2.4 trillion (depending on the size of the spending cuts agreed to in the final deal).


- They have now agreed to spending cuts of roughly $1.2 trillion over 10 years.

- The formation of a special Congressional committee to recommend further deficit reduction of up to $1.6 trillion (whatever it takes to add up to the total of the debt ceiling increase). This deficit reduction could take the form of spending cuts, tax increases or both.

- The special committee must make recommendations by late November (before Congress' Thanksgiving recess).

- If Congress does not approve those cuts by December 23, automatic across-the-board cuts go into effect, including cuts to Defense and Medicare. This "trigger" is designed to force action on the deficit reduction committee's recommendations by making the alternative painful to both Democrats and Republicans.

- A vote, in both the House and Senate, on a balanced budget amendment.

Oy.  So the deal is tons of immediate cuts, zero tax increases, and a commitment to more cuts in the future.  There's a triggering mechanism for more cuts if the parties can't agree on more deficit reduction, the idea being that both parties don't want these automatic across-the-board cuts and will have incentive to avoid them.  But I don't see much incentive for Republicans to avoid them- they're fine with across the board cuts and no tax increases.  Liberals are "disappointed".  How about furious???

Any "automatic" trigger has to include tax increases somewhere, or the Republicans have no incentive to do a deal.

This may be premature- maybe Democrats are negotiating harder than reports say, and maybe there'll be something more reasonable at the end of the day.  But if this passes as reported now it really does mark the end of the Democratic party as the voice of the poor and middle class.  There's nowhere else to go, of course (a liberal friend of mine told me the other night that he'd vote for Romney over Obama at this point- I'm not going that far but I'd certainly think about a protest vote for a liberal third party candidate).

In 2000, while he was throwing the election to George W. Bush, Ralph Nader famously said that "there's not a dime's worth of difference" between Al Gore and GWB, so the vote should be for him.  That turned out to be disastrous.  But at least Al Gore was rhetorically making liberal points.  At least he had a track record of supporting left-of-center policies.  Barack Obama had such a track record in the Senate, and the Affordable Care Act was a great accomplishment.  This year, however, he's left the reservation.  If he and Harry Reid sign off on this, there really isn't a dime's worth of difference between them and arch-conservative Republicans.