The only place I can get information on the substance of the deal right now is TPM; admittedly not the most neutral of sources but it appears to have the nuts and bolts spelled out where no one else does.
I’m not unhappy in principle with the broad strokes of the deal. The fact that both sides of the disagreement have been reputedly unhappy and disquieted by the results of the negotiating process suggests to me that both sides were pushed beyond their comfort zones, that both sides gave more than they really wanted to, and therefore that the process was, at the end of the day, what you would hope for from a good faith approach aimed at resolving the dispute.
What I’m unhappy with is the “kick the can down the road” approach to the spending cuts. A bipartisan commission will, later, come up with $1.2 trillion worth of cuts. Only it won’t. Jason was a little faster on the draw than I on that point but I fundamentally agree with him — it is not in Congress’ nature to cut spending; it has no incentive to cut spending. And, it is no incentive to stick to the across-the-board automatic cuts in the “trigger,” which are going to suck just as bad as the more specifically-selected cuts that this commission is supposed to make and Congress is supposed to adopt. Congress can simply abrogate the trigger when it finds that living up to the promises it made to itself are politically too difficult, and thus do what everyone would really prefer to do anyway, which is to wait for inflation to ease the burden of the deficit rather than actually cut anything that will make a constituency unhappy with no counterbalancing approval from the public.
What will happen in six months is that Congress will renege on the deal and the President will not care. And we’ll be left in the situation we’re in, except with more debt. Fans of debt — fans of Keynes — will say this is the right thing to do while the economy is weak, so we should be satisfied with such a result. That’s great, except for the oft-demonstrated behavior of Congress in times of economic expansion: Congress continues to deficit-spend in those times, it fails to repurchase its debt left over from the bad times, it accumulates debt when it should be using surplusses to reduce debt.
So I predict there will be no spending cuts in the short run and there will be only incomplete Keynsianism in the long run. Same as it ever was.
