Open thread for night owls: The Grand Con

Digby:

This is why we have Simpson and Bowles and David Walker and Alice Rivlin and every other fiscal scold in the country is running all over Capitol Hill rending their garments that the congress simply must repeal this horrible "sequester" --- and replace it with a more "balanced approach." Like Simpson-Bowles.

The con is this: they are all acting as if the deficit targets are carved in stone and cannot be changed only the way to get there. And the Democrats are right there selling the same snake oil. Their only deal breaker is some kind of revenue in exchange for cuts, which some of the the Republicans seem to have finally begun to see is the deal of a lifetime.

After all, we already know that the desire to repeal the defense cuts is thoroughly bipartisan. Leon Panetta already gave that game away. They are being used as a negotiating tool to get recalcitrant Republicans on board with some kind of "revenue" that the Democrats can call a "win" in exchange for Simpson-Bowles level cuts. (The Tea Party faction is not inclined to give Democrats even a phony "win" but that calculation may very well be different in the lame duck.)

Competition for the title may be fierce, but I'm fairly certain that the asinine debt ceiling "compromise", consisting of equal parts pointless committee and unenforceable promises, will go down as the single worst piece of legislation passed during the last four years. And it's a bipartisan bit of jackassery, too, requiring stupidity and/or insincerity from both sides.

News flash: the Republicans signed on to the "sequester" with absolutely no intentions of following through with it. The only question is whether they now, having stated outright that they have absolutely no intentions of following through with it, can successfully change the law to exempt defense cuts while leaving cuts to every other damn thing in place, or whether a"compromise" is negotiated that still nullifies every bit of the defense cuts in exchange for some token easing of the non-defense cuts, or whether all parties involved admit they were gigantic morons for even proposing this humiliatingly asinine nonsense in the first place, axe the sequester entirely, and start contemplating the budget again from some marginally more adult standpoint.

Since there is almost zero chance of that last bit happening, it seems we are back to the usual routine of wondering whether the eventual deal cut will be catastrophically bad, or just astonishingly bad. There's no particular interest in repairing the economy among these clowns, but there's still quite a lot of interest in potential ways to make things just that much worse, for anyone who is not either wealthy or connected.

After tax cuts, conspicuously unfunded wars and the like, we've simply run out of easy money we can fork over to the rich unless we fundamentally change how we treat everyone else. Before the Great Recession hit, the corporate anarchist class tried convincing us that shoving everyone's Social Security into the private stock market casino would be a fun idea; if you can't take the money outright, just pass a law saying the public has to at least let you play with it a while. We only got a healthcare bill by promising that private interests would keep, and expand, their current, captive for-profit market. But there's no more money to give, at this point. If we want to enact the Ryan plan, or the Romney plan, or any of the other excruciatingly similar plans to lift even more of the naughty burdens of citizenship from the rich, we've got to take that money directly from someone else'and it's not going to be from defense contractors.

It's amazing that we're at the point where politicians are openly advocating for taking dollars away from poor Americans, sick Americans, retirees and others in order to hand that money directly over to rich people in the form of tax breaks, but there we are. Whether or not the crown prince of the 0.01% wins election this November doesn't even matter; by December, all of Washington will once again be twisting itself in knots to justify that very thing. Yet again.

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