While all the attention is being paid to the suicidal skylarking of the Republicans as regards the Affordable Care Act, Richard Eskow points out that, in the mix right now, and trading on the preposterous notion that both sides are somehow at fault over this, the deficit fetishists are back. Even Messrs. Simpson and Bowles have rolled away the stone. They have their commission’s recommendations to wave around. The Fix The Debt frauds are wandering the Green Rooms. While all this scrambling about defunding the ACA is going on, it is very likely that the various cultists in Congress, at the instigation of the White House, might decide to start feeding Vaal again.
There’s nothing that leads me to believe that the president has abandoned his desire for a Grand Bargain, even if the political context within which one might be reached, has catapulted itself beyond the izonkosphere. It is the secondary deals that could be cut in this particular crisis — the GB, or our old pal, the Keystone XL pipeline — that are going to be worth watching. The side deals are where the real damage could get done and, once those side deals are cut, the damage is likely to be buried under a blizzard of Beltway platitudes about “compromise,” “bipartisanship,” and “shared sacrifice.” The fact that it is beyond indecent for the Democrats to join in the notion that cutting social spending at a time of grinding unemployment doesn’t seem to stop a lot of them from considering it. And, as always, it’s important to keep in mind the blog’s First Law Of Economics: Fk The Deficit. People got no jobs. People got no money.
The vultures are circling
