http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/04/09/the-shutdown-wrap-boehner-wins-austerity-wins-and-the-social-conservatives-go-home-with-a-participant-trophy.aspxThe No-Shutdown Wrap: Boehner Wins, Austerity Wins, and the Social Conservatives Go Home With A "Participant" Trophy
Posted Saturday, April 09, 2011 12:04 AM | By David Weigel
Shortly after 10:50 p.m., Speaker of the House John Boehner was the first budget negotiator to announce that there’d been a deal, and a government shutdown would be averted. Shortly after that President Barack Obama announced that he’d sign “the biggest annual spending cut in our history.”
You’d have to be asleep not to see who won tonight.
Am I about to engage in that hideous Washington parlor game of declaring “winners and losers,” as if billions of dollars that would affect real lives were just Monopoly papers being moved across a board? I hope not. What I mean is that most economists agree – sorry, Austrians, you’re still outnumbered – that when a country is pulling out of a recession, it’s not a good idea to slash spending. It didn’t work in 1937, it’s not working too well in the UK. It was a few short weeks ago when Mark Zandi was suggesting that $61 billion of cuts could cost 700,000 jobs by 2012, and Ben Bernanke suggested they could knock a little bit off of our GDP.
And yet. For the second time in five months, the White House has faced a political crisis, looked at an opposition that completely disagreed with liberal economics, and blinked. Five months ago, automatic tax increases were stopped, and the GOP got a validation of supply-side economics. Tonight, in a battle over a much smaller amount of money, the Democrats signed on to austerity economics. They didn’t have much of a choice, but they didn’t challenge the premise, either. We’re a long way from the “Sputnik moment.”
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