I’ve cruised around looking for any significant development on the debt ceiling front, and at the moment everyone seems to be pretty much mired in the same holes they were in yesterday.
The CBO has decided that Sen. Harry Reid’s debt ceiling deal actually would cut the deficit more than Rep. John Boehner’s, and of course Boehner denies this.
This is Ezra’s version of optimism —
Boehner’s plan will need to fail to convince Republicans of the political reality that they can’t get past the Senate without compromising. There’s a good chance that the market will need to panic or the government will have to stop sending out checks to convince Republicans of the economic reality that compromising to lift the debt ceiling is a necessary thing to do.
But once those two facts are established, the Reid and Boehner plans are fairly similar to one another, and it’s not that difficult to see how they can be merged into a final compromise.
Easy for rational people, perhaps. Easy for your average Cub Scout troop. Easy for a kennel of border collies. But Congress? Puh-leeze. (And there are some fresh reports that congressional Republicans are rallying behind Boehner’s plan, which the President has sworn to veto.)
But isn’t Ezra saying here that we’re going to have to default before the House Republicans will get serious about preventing default? That doesn’t cheer me up much.
These go back a couple days, but here are a couple of links for reference —
How the Deficit Got This Big
Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph
