Fiscal cliff and the frenzy
Via Business Insider, Joe Weisenthal offers a look at the explosion of media covering the notion of ‘fiscal cliff’.
I was going to list representative links but gave up…I leave it to readers to supply their own sources for this post.
The issue has been framed as mostly an ideological and partisan battle, with a life of its own separate from any technical, economic, or financial consequences from reasonably competent “analysts”.
The fear is so great that the public wants an answer regardless of the details. (Notice that talking point sounds familiar).
There are are usually only two parts to the problem,
1. Unspecified tax changes, often lumped under loopholesandexemptions.
2. Sociasecuritymedicare are now the only drivers that matter to the cliff.
repeated and repeated and until it feels like simple cut and paste from the articles I have read….and often buried in the middle somewhere of the text.
who are the people who want a cut and pasted solution?
well, fwiw, i can confirm what the chart reveals; without any effort, i ran across & inlcuded in my aggregate blog around 30 fiscal cliff articles last week, and there were another dozen were encouraging some kind of “grand bargain”..
grabbing a few headlines:
What does President Obama’s re-election mean for the ‘fiscal cliff?’;
Economists Worry About Fiscal Cliff Resolution;
IMF urges permanent fix to U.S. ‘fiscal cliff’
almost seems orchestrated..
I think the orchestration feel comes from the gradual filtration of musicians down to those who listen to and then play all the same genre of music. Eventually the band just plays because all the musicians who would have been interpreted as not being in sync with the band are gone.
It is the “village” in action.
“As you can see, there’s WAY more talk about the Fiscal Cliff than there was at the peak of the debt ceiling!”
Is this just because people are still at election levels of talking about something?
To answer my own question, not entirely. As long as Congress did something, the debt ceiling was going to have no impact on peoples paychecks. The sunsetting of the tax cuts (whatever you call it) will impact peoples paychecks.