The Deal

The New Deal it is not.

Sad that it has come to this and surely liberals will be outraged and will scream and holler that Obama has betrayed them and given in too much.

I am disappointed in the deal to be sure. But this is the kind of "deal" you get when you are negotiating with a group of terrorists and that's what the Republican Party has become. Those who think that Obama could have done better in these negotiations really need to picture him staked out outside of a bank with group of hostage takers making demands. The "deal" you make in that situation is going to be something like this. You're going to give them some money, a car to get out of town, and someone gets released from jail. The hope is that you will still nab these criminals once they've released the hostages. That part of the game is still to be caught.

My point is liberals should watch how Obama seeks to "catch" these criminals now. What is being enacted into law now is $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years. Another set of cuts will be coming. But all these cuts are down the road. All that stuff can still be revised any time Congress decides to do so. All that is guaranteed is what happens in the short term: 1) An increase in the debt ceiling through the next election and 2) some much smaller amount of cuts that will happen immediately.

Oh, and by the way, if you're upset about taxes not being a part of this deal ... remember that Obama still is holding that "hostage" too. The Bush tax cuts expire after 2012 ... all of them. So, if nothing else happens, taxes ARE going up. Some of those will be going up in ways we liberals don't like (the earned income tax credit expansion for instance). But taxes on the wealthy ARE going up unless some other change in law happens.

What matters most now is how this gets spun politically in the context of the coming election.