I have stated many times my view of the importance of tax policy and how it impacts all aspects of government policy (spending regulation enforcement, etc.) Ronald Reagan understood this point, and his most important achievements, from his perspective, came in the area of tax policy. Most Beltway Dems and bloggers are blind to this fact. Including President Obama. A recent National Journal article restated Barack Obama's view of Ronald Reagan as his model of a transformative President:

Ezra Klein, a supporter of The Deal, now frets about Part 2:

[There will be] a new fight in February over the spending bill that will take the government through to 2012. House Republicans are already talking about cutting back to 2008 levels -- which would require about $90 billion in cuts, and wipe out much of the stimulus in the recent tax deal. [. . .] Republicans will have both a government shutdown and a fiscal crisis to tie to the proverbial train tracks. Will Obama and the Democrat be willing to risk it? Some say they will. [. . .] More pessimistic voices, however, wonder whether a president who wouldn't permit a a modest tax hike will be any more daring when hundreds of thousands of federal workers and the credit of the United States of America are on the line. I'm closer to the pessimists, myself.[. . .]

(Emphasis supplied.) The Deal was a terrible mistake.

Speaking for me only

Ezra Klein writes:

[A WaPo poll a]sked whether Obama and the Republicans were sincere in their desire to reduce the budget deficit, Obama beat the Republicans by a wide margin[.]

Ezra thinks this is good news. I think it is terrible news. Now that the Bush/Obama tax cuts have passed, the race to prove "quien es mas macho" about cutting government spending has begun. Howard Fineman writes:

David Dayen:

This was the trade made in the Senate last night; the Dems will get legislative repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a couple judges, and probably the new START Treaty, and the Republicans will get the chance to massively cut spending early in the 112th Congress. If I’m a Republican, I take that trade.

This all came about last night, when [. . .] Senate Republicans [. . .] informed Harry Reid that they would renege on their support of the $1.1 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill[. . . .] Reid suddenly didn’t have the votes for anything but a short-term continuing resolution, probably for two months until February 18.

Say what you will about the GOP, they do understand The Madman Theory of Political Bargaining and also know when they have chumps at the other side of the table.

Krugman:

[S]upply-side economics should have been killed by the Clinton years: he raised taxes on the rich, everyone on the right predicted catastrophe, and what followed was 8 years of rapid growth and surging revenues, with the budget actually moving into surplus for the first time in three decades. But no: the right interpreted all the good stuff as a lagged effect of the 1981 tax cut[.]

The "most progressive Administration in a generation" and its Beltway supporters are now the leading purveyors of this Zombie Lie.

David Dayen:

John Boehner’s statement[. . .]:

Stopping all the tax hikes is a good first step [. . .] but much more needs to be done, including cutting spending, permanently eliminating the threat of job-killing tax hikes, and repealing the job-killing health care law[.]

This is one step along the road to the Norquistian dream of endless low taxes, starving the government of revenue, and the necessary reaction to that of cutting services[.]

Laissez les bons temps rouler.

Not that there is a snowball's chance of it happening, but now is most definitely NOT the time for filibuster reform in the Senate.

In the upcoming Congress, a Republican House will be passing all kinds of bad bills. President Obama seems unwilling to be a veto (pun intended) point in the process. Our last best hope for limiting the damage is in fact the filibuster in the Senate.

Apparently, many folks are hopeful of some good things coming out of the next Congress. I'm not one of those people. Bill Clinton vetoed 17 bills in the 2 years after the 1994 elections delivered the Congress to the Republicans, including vetoes that precipitated government shutdowns. I don't expect President Obama to veto any. The filibuster in the Senate will need to be the veto point.

Speaking for me only

Matt Yglesias writes:

The deficit is a problem only in the sense that the short-term deficit is currently too small. But this is one reason I’m surprised so many liberals are being so stinty in their praise of the recent tax deal. We’d just all been spending 12 months arguing that contrary to the conventional wisdom, short-term deficits should be smaller. We also spent a lot of time observing that conservative deficit-talk is fraudulent and all they care about is tax cuts for the rich. Then the Obama administration, after a year of fruitless austerity gambits, finally called their bluff. “Fine, you can have your deficit-increasing tax cut extension, but give me some other deficit-increasing stuff that my economists say has a higher multiplier than your tax cuts for the rich.” Now the deal is done, and for all the panels and commissions and all the money Pete Peterson’s spent the parties are coming together to make the deficit bigger.

This is all kinds of wrong. I'll explain on the flip.

Sen. Al Franken on The Deal:

A lot of people are unhappy that the president punted on first down, and I'm one of them. Extending the excessive Bush tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires will explode our deficit over the next two years without doing anything to help our economy. I think it's simply bad policy. [. . .] If this is the prelude of a permanent extension of the Bush tax breaks for the super-wealthy, we're in big trouble. We'll lose our ability to make the investments we need to grow our way out of long-term budget deficits: education, infrastructure, and research and development.

(Emphasis supplied.) Al Franken voted for The Deal.

Ezra Klein writes:

I listed some of the conservative critics of the tax deal in Wonkbook today (Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Patriots, Charles Krauthammer), but Playbook shows their ranks are growing: Mitt Romney has an op-ed in USA Today saying the tax deal gives "President Obama ... reason to celebrate. The deal delivers short-term economic stimulus, and it does so at the very time he wants it most, before the 2012 elections."

[More...]

U.S. Diplomat Richard Holbrooke has died following heart surgery. He was 69.

An administration official says Richard Holbrooke, a longtime U.S. diplomat who wrote part of the Pentagon Papers, was the architect of the 1995 Bosnia peace plan and served as President Barack Obama's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, has died. He was 69.

Some details about him are here. He is survived by his wife, Kati Marton, who was formerly married to ABC anchor Peter Jennings.

A lot of prominent deaths this week: Elizabeth Edwards, Mark Madoff and now Richard Holbrooke. May they all rest in peace.

Here's New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on "Meet the Press" today, answering a question about how President Obama should deal with an angry liberal base over the tax cut deal:

MAYOR BLOOMBERG: He says, "Look, this is what I did, this is the best I can do. Suck it up, and let's get on together. We have a lot of other things that we can do together."

Bloomberg also categorically rejected the idea of running for President.