A fair reading of the new debt ceiling/spending cut "deal," as of right now unpassed, Is that it's not good for what ails us and, more importantly, appears to be a pretty important abdication of the state's role in the post-WWII era.
Take the threatened defense cuts, for example, the left has been calling for these ever since Reagan turned us into military-industrial complex with a state attached; however, the idea has always been to redirect the spending into productive or socially useful, infrastructure, research, etc, or necessary, e.g., education, welfare, medicine, acts and transactions. Across the board cuts in defense spending will lead to a loss of jobs in both the explicit defense industry, factories, support services and other contractors[1], as well as those dependent on these now unemployed people. How this can be anything other than bad is beyond me. What's worse is that lots of these workers make a decent wage, a janitor, for example, working in the Pentagon or for a military contractor is making more than a janitor at Macy, although both are underpaid. So this is yet another blow against decent paying jobs and etc.
I have no idea what the people engaged in crafting this deal were thinking[2]; but I am leaning toward hypnotized by toads fed up with wetlands destruction striking a blow for their amphibian brothers.
[1] I know, I know, but lots of people have jobs not only creating fighter planes and bombs and what not but also logistics and food.
[2] And I am sick of the ill-informed attempts to explain the negotiating process all of which proceed from zero actual information and rely on various forms of tea-leaf reading criticism, which, particularly on the left, which rely on some mixutre of: Obama got rolled, Obama's a coward, Obama's a neocon
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