The New York Times, here at CNBC.com, admits it: Obama's victories in the fiscal cliff deal were small.
"For President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress, the fiscal deal reached this week is full of small victories that further their largest policy aims. ... White House officials took the path they did because they feared that a hardened stance on the debt ceiling would result in no deal at all: taxes would have risen on nearly everyone; automatic spending cuts would have begun; jobless benefits would have ended for many; and markets may have reacted badly.
"In the chaos that could have followed, the officials believed, a grand bargain would have been unlikely. If anything, Democrats -- worried they would be blamed for the economy's troubles, as the party holding the White House -- might have struggled to get a deal as good as this week's. Having won this round, Democrats still have compromises to offer Republicans in the next one, like changes to Social Security."
In other words, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts was a gun pointed at Obama's already terrible economy. There was no way the Democrats were going to let that gun go off and ruin the second term of the most overrated president in history. The stock markets knew it for months, which is why they never tanked even as the expiration date passed.
Here's a newsflash for the readers of the NYT: this deal is as good as it's going to get, and Democrats lost big even on the tax hike on the rich because, despite raising taxes on estates and on high incomes, dividends and capital gains, the AMT fix is going to cost the Feds (read: offset the taxes paid by the rich) $1.8 trillion over ten years. The price of that to the rich was barely $600 billion over ten years for those other things, about which so-called conservatives doth protest too much. The rich aren't going to be getting any less rich at all.
And the Times boasts that the deal reduces economic inequality. In their dreams. What a joke.
If Democrats won anything, it's that the economy isn't going to tank immediately under their mismanagement, and that they have more time to take the credit for the successes the Republicans achieve.
