Ezra Kelin is someone who often, in the past, seemed to welcome the administration position on most issues. It's thus interesting that he's growing increasingly unhappy of late with much of what the administration does, including the deficit deal. (And it's not just Ezra. I'd put Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver in the same category, and even Krugman, who you'll recall during health care reform starting drinking the Kool-Aid for a while.) I would suggest that this is evidence that discontent with the President has moved beyond the "Internet left fringe" and now strikes at the core of the believers.
Support for the President never seems to improve - it always seems to grow weaker.
More from Ezra on the deficit deal:
This is a terrible, no-good, very bad deal.
It's not just that Congress waited until the last minute, taking an unnecessary risk in a fragile economy. And it's not just that the tough decisions got punted once again. This is a bad bill at a time when the economy -- and the American people -- needed a good one. It's a bill that does too little now, and too little later, and it comes in lieu of an obvious, achievable solution that would have done better.
The two reigning theories of our current economic moment are not opposed to one another. The economy is weak now, with too little demand and too little growth, and threatened by mounting deficits later. The answer, as any economist can tell you and as many told Congress, is simple: do more to support the recovery now and more to cut deficits later. In the short-term, we should expand the payroll tax cut, make a massive investment in infrastructure, continue funding unemployment insurance, and do more to aid the states. In the long-run, we should cut spending in entitlement programs as well as discretionary programs, and raise significant revenues and modernize the tax code by flattening the base and closing loopholes.
These two priorities don't conflict. In fact, they support each other. Faster growth now will mean smaller deficits later. And politically, more stimulus now would have helped Democrats agree to more deficit reduction later. But our political system isn't very good at both/and. It's more suited to either/or. And so Republicans fought stimulus now and couldn't agree to the revenues necessary for significant deficit reduction later. So we got neither. We're pulling support out from under a teetering economy now and we're punting the hard decisions on the deficit to yet another committee, and yet another manufactured deadline.
