Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Bargaining and Its Limits

The seemingly endless series of budget showdowns that have characterized the last two years has a lot of people frustrated, and understandably so. But I think it’s a mistake to attribute that pattern to a failure to seriously bargain, as many critics suggest. It is in fact the only plausible outcome of bargaining given our increasingly problematic fiscal state. A lasting bargain—a middle-ground deal that provides a solution that endures for many years, of the sort reached in the 80s and 90s—is not really going to be possible in this situation. And the frustration about this has to do with a failure to grasp just what our situation is, and just how different the goals of the two parties are at this point.
  

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