"Fiscal Cliff" Deal Does Very Little
Obama, at his point of maximum leverage, gets… very little done:
Zachary Goldfarb: The agreement… fails to defuse the prospect of a catastrophic national default two months from now… does not raise the debt ceiling…. Nor does the package do anything to address stubbornly high levels of unemployment, with 12 million Americans out of work. Instead… [b]y allowing the payroll tax cut to expire, the deal takes money out of the hands of many Americans, sucking it out of the economy and slowing economic activity. And, finally, the deal is too modest to fundamentally tame the government’s soaring debt.
