that gives his party practically everything it asked for.
That's not exactly true. The upfront spending "cuts" are tiny. The only enforcement mechanism for the later cuts is that if they don't go in to effect by the process set up in this agreement then there will be an automatic reduction from the spending baseline. The automatic reduction would exclude entitlement payments to individuals, and would mostly be military cuts and reductions in payments to providers of medical care. Those reductions are hardly concessions, the left generally wants military cuts and hasn't been particularly against reducing payments to medical care service providers. The deal includes no balanced budget amendment, no entitlement reform, and little in the way of up front spending control. The one thing it does give the Republicans is that it doesn't include any tax increases. That's big, but even here there is a problem. The deal doesn't consider current practice as the baseline it considers current law as the baseline. Since current law includes a tax increase, and includes spending increases, the deal creates a situation where keeping spending the same gets counted as a spending cut, and keeping taxes the same counts as a tax cut, creating a bias towards future tax increases. That bias might not be a very large factor as long as Republicans stay nearly universally firm in opposing tax increases, but I'm not sure how much or how long, such firmness can be counted on.
It probably would have been better to accept an actual tax increase, counting current practice/spending/tax rates etc. as the baseline, in exchange for some entitlement reform that reduced future expenses, as long as the increase was closing loopholes (which Obama was calling for). But I'm not sure whether such a deal was a possibility. |
