It’s a bad deal, and the Republicans in the House should vote it down.  Indeed, they should refuse even to take up the bill until the Senate has actually voted on the budget bill which the House passed in spring of last year, which would obviate all of this, or on the House-passed fiscal cliff solution from last September (which CBSNews claims doesn’t address the fiscal cliff, even though it significantly reduces Federal spending).

If the House Republicans accede to this deal, there’ll be no meaningful spending cuts, no chance for deficit elimination, no chance for debt pay down, the coming debt ceiling “negotiations” notwithstanding.  No, the Republicans will only be confirming their failure in summer of 2011, and their Senate failure last night, and solidifying their habit of folding under pressure.  And so it will be easy for them to fold, yet again, in two months’ time.

But quite aside from that political failure, they will be creating an economic and social failure: there is no need for the Federal government to receive yet more revenue.  Yet allowing the government to expand its raids on the private pocketbook, they will be condemning Americans to existence as government wards.  After all, President Barack Obama is on record in his victory speech yesterday as saying he intends to use this tax increase to fund additional “welfare,” rather than to pay down the debt, and as saying he wants yet more tax increases in the next round of talks—with which to expand “welfare.”

Even the chump change spending cuts in this deal represent abject surrender for the emasculated party.  The deal agrees to slip the sequester by two months, but that only achieves a spending cut of $24 billion.  That’s one surrender, but it could have been choked down in favor of dealing seriously with spending in the coming debt ceiling debate.  However,

Republicans had insisted the cuts of $24 billion be offset with savings in other areas.  The White House wanted some of the offset to be in the form of tax increases, not just other spending cuts.

Republicans folded (there’s that habit, again).

The deal pays for delaying the sequester with a mix of new taxes and spending cuts[.]  …$12 billion would come from a shift in the rules affecting workplace-based 401(k) plans.

A tax increase from which President Barack Obama’s union allies are carefully shielded, no matter their incomes.

This is a bad deal.

Kill it.