Will Wilkinson yawns at the debt ceiling deal:
Maybe Washington's game of debt-ceiling chicken went on too long for comfort, but the resolution of the game looks a lot like a pragmatic compromise to me. … [I]t looks like our democracy will have raised the debt ceiling, didn't really cut a thing, passed off responsibility for substantial deficit reduction to a "super committee", which will either come up with a plan that does not bind the future executive and legislature or will trip a "trigger" that won't go into effect until after the next election, and then, again, will go into effect only if the government of the future wants it to go into effect. If this is what "raw extortion" delivers, it's not very much.
Graph of the Descretionary Spending Cap in the Bipartisan Budget Deal Budget Authority, $ Billions, via Tyler Cowen. The bars go up because the cuts in the deal are from the CBO baseline, which predicted even higher spending increases before the debt bill.
The Dish 