While many in Washington are breathing a sigh of relief and some are trying to spin the outcome as a win for the president, those who characterize this bill as a genuine victory for anyone at all have clearly lost perspective. The deal brokered by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does make good on President Obama's promise to bring a little more equity to the tax code by raising rates on wealthier Americans, and it temporarily averts the most draconian "sequestration" cuts. But the list of what it does not do, and what it does wrong, is long.

By midday Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office had concluded that the Biden-McConnell package would add nearly $4 trillion to federal deficits over the next 10 years. This was largely because it actually extends and makes permanent more than 80% of the Bush tax cuts. So much for the idea that this whole struggle was supposed to help America get its financial house in order.

Just as bad, or perhaps worse in terms of the day-to-day lives of average people, the bill only postpones the forced cuts of sequestration by two months, to precisely the moment the country will be engaged in another ruinous debate about lifting our national debt ceiling to ensure the country can pay its bills. It thus creates a new, even more dangerous fiscal cliff....

Read it all.

Update: George Will has also written on this I see--Perils Of The Entitlement State And Our Decadent Democracy.

Filed under: * Economics, Politics • Economy • The U.S. Government • Budget • Medicare • Social Security • The National Deficit • Politics in General • House of Representatives • Office of the President • President Barack Obama • Senate • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

1. APB wrote: Makes you wonder how we got here, doesn’t it? January 3, 8:20 am | [comment link]

2. Jim the Puritan wrote: Our system of government has become irreparably corrupt, from the president on down.  It’s now a mixture of an unaccountable aristocracy, plutocracy and kleptocracy.  It has ceased to have any moral authority and I no longer support any of it.  America as we knew it finally died in 2012 after a lingering illness. January 3, 2:25 pm | [comment link]

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