Krugman Tells Obama: DON'T MAKE A DEAL

In his brand new op-ed at the NYT, Paul Krugman makes the loudest case yet that Obama shouldn't rush into any kind of big "deal" with the GOP on averting the fiscal cliff.
Liberals have been going in this direction for awhile, arguing two things: Hitting the fiscal cliff would not be a huge catastrophe right away, and the GOP has lost a lot of leverage, so there's no reason to cave to their insistence on everything.
So Krugman tells Obama not to reach his hand out to far:

In saying this, I don’t mean to minimize the very real economic dangers posed by the so-called fiscal cliff that is looming at the end of this year if the two parties can’t reach a deal. Both the Bush-era tax cuts and the Obama administration’s payroll tax cut are set to expire, even as automatic spending cuts in defense and elsewhere kick in thanks to the deal struck after the 2011 confrontation over the debt ceiling. And the looming combination of tax increases and spending cuts looks easily large enough to push America back into recession.

Nobody wants to see that happen. Yet it may happen all the same, and Mr. Obama has to be willing to let it happen if necessary.

Why? Because Republicans are trying, for the third time since he took office, to use economic blackmail to achieve a goal they lack the votes to achieve through the normal legislative process. In particular, they want to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, even though the nation can’t afford to make those tax cuts permanent and the public believes that taxes on the rich should go up — and they’re threatening to block any deal on anything else unless they get their way. So they are, in effect, threatening to tank the economy unless their demands are met.

Krugman then goes on to make a very critical point, which is that there's no really a "cliff."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/krugman-on-the-fiscal-cliff-2012-11#ixzz2Bj6WQZGX