James K. Galbraith wanted a "no" vote on the debt deal

It's pretty obvious from my tweets that I wanted President Obama to go 14th Amendment on the Republicans and the Tea Party. And because of that, despite the possibility of a default, I was actually hoping for either the Senate or the House to torpedo the deal, so that the last recourse would have been the 14th Amendment. I think there was a lot of upside to that route.

But it didn't happen, of course. Now, here's the thing. The best outcome of this whole process would have been a "grand bargain" that included revenues. Even a modest revenue capitulation would have been a stunning victory for the forces of light and good. So if Obama messed that up by asking for more revenue, then it was his mistake. But I think that he didn't mess up. I think that there was no way Boehner could have gotten the House to vote for anything that included even a smidge of revenue. I think that when Obama asked for more, it gave Boehner the chance that he was looking for, to walk out on negotiations that would have made him look bad -- becuz if he'd shaken hands with the President on a deal that included revenue, and then came back to the House and got it voted down (just like basically happened when he didn't have the unbelievably stupid "Cut, Cap, and Balance" framework in the bill, which the Tea Party ultimately forced on him) -- then he'd have looked even worse than he did. And face it, the Thursday night mutiny made him look bad: weak, unable to lead, and it made the House GOP look like what they are -- unable to govern the country responsibly.

So anyway, James K. Galbraith summed it up nicely in "Vote No to the Debt Deal":

"On dishonesty: the proposed cuts would reduce discretionary public spending as a share of GDP to what it was before the government had any major role in transportation, housing, education, safety, health, medical research or environmental protection. To where it was before the NIH or the CDC, before HUD, before the EPA, before OSHA, before the Department of Education. This is a false promise: those cuts cannot and will not be found. To promise them is to play to the gallery of the ignorant. To pretend that to make them would be good policy is to repudiate the entire past half-century. To make them would bring on a disaster, in many small and large ways, as the physical structures and legal and institutional protections built up over decades crumbled and fell apart."