Do you believe it?

Ezra Klein reports:

We don't yet know what the final deal to raise the debt ceiling will be. But now that Harry Reid is developing a proposal with $2.7 trillion in cuts and nothing in revenues, it's a safe bet that it won't include any tax increases. Which means that whether Republicans realize it or not, they've won. The question now is whether they can stop. (...)

Obama still wants a big deal, reports Zachary Goldfarb: "Obama’s political advisers have long believed that securing such an agreement would provide an enormous boost to his 2012 campaign, according to people familiar with White House thinking. In particular, they want to preserve and improve the president’s standing among political independents, who abandoned Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections and who say reining in the nation’s debt is a high priority.

Will the debt deal be an enormous boost to Obama's 2012 campaign? It finally became clear that one major, if not the major, element of a deal was to secure Republican support for modest simulative policies (Unemployment Insurance extension, 2% FICA holiday for another year, highway spending) that were clearly directed at helping the White House recover from a too-small-and-misallocated stimulus plan of 2009.


posted by Quiddity at 7/25/2011 07:30:00 AM