We hit the debt-ceiling today. The WSJ explains how the Treasury will juggle its books to avoid default and buy us some time. Ezra Klein checks in on the negotiations:
There's not been much evident progress towards a deal in recent days, though there's been an escalation in Republican demands from the Senate side (McConnell wants Medicare cuts but no tax increases) and a plea from the Obama administration for Democrats to stop adding new demands onto an already overburdened negotiations process. But the outlines of a deal have been relatively obvious for some time: For better or worse, the final deal will be heavily tilted towards spending cuts, and accompanied by some sort of procedural mechanism to make future deficit reduction more likely.
Chait sets some ground rules:
Republicans want to force [Obama] to agree to a budget deal he doesn't like as the price for lifting the debt ceiling? Then he gets to attack the terms of that deal. That's how ransoms work. You can demand that the mayor hand over a suitcase with ten million dollars in non-sequentially marked bills in return for you not blowing up a bus, but you can't also expect the mayor to run around saying how proud he is that he and the hostage-taker were able to work out this wonderful bargain. If the Republicans want to strike a fiscal bargain that both sides believe would improve public policy that happens to be concurrent with the passage of the debt ceiling, then that's another story.
This seems more prudent to me than Krugman's crash-and-burn strategy.
The Dish 