TPM Reader DW on the need for a grand bargain …
I agree with Obama that a big fiscal taxes and spending deal that puts in place an actual budget blue print for 10 years is critically important. The amount of cash sitting on corporate balance sheets is staggering (and unprecedented), and the uncertainty in Federal budgeting as we jump from crisis to crisis is strangling the economy of life. It’s said so often now, its become a cliché, but the economy needs the kind of certainly that only a long term blue print of taxes and spending can provide. Corporations need to know where to put their money and, just as importantly, where not too. They can’t know this until such a blue-print is in place.
My favorite example is Clinton’s budget deal in 1993, that set spending and taxes and gave the markets certainty, and ushered in the longest sustained economic expansion since WWII.
Republican leaders also believe a ‘Grand Bargain’ is exactly what the economy needs which is why they are doing everything to prevent it and create and endless cycle of budget crises.
This all seems pretty obvious to me. What is also obvious is that it’s foolish for Obama to give up chained CPI outside of a ‘Grand Bargain’ he wants so badly. I thought he had finally learned to stop negotiating against himself. Like their dishonest attempts to beat Obama over the head with his supposed Medicare cuts in the last election, Republicans will surely be more than happy to beat him up with social security cuts in 2014. Republicans care not a whit about intellectual honesty and journalists have no interest in calling them out on their shameless hypocrisy.
