After weeks of public posturing, Congress finally passed a budget, hours before the federal government would have been forced to shut down. Of course, "public posturing" might mean "good negotiating," and there ois nothing inherently wrong with negotiating. In fact, in one view, both House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama did their jobs fairly well, preventing the economic collapse that would have followed a shut-down while aslo refusing to bail on their basic principles. In difficult moments like these compromise can be painful and expensive.
But the real question will be whether this budget or its underlying principles will achieve anything important. Mark McKinnon of The Daily Beast says that it will not, and that all Obama did was position himself to be re-elected in 2012. McKinnon says that Republican Paul Ryan's plan is the best Congressionally-proposed idea because it makes steep cuts and tries to reform the whole process. Mark Blumenthal, of The Huffington Post, on the other hand, says that Ryan's plan will be the electoral death of the GOP because nobody wants to cut Medicare and Medicaid. Obviously, these are not mutually exclusive statements: what works politically frequently fails economically. But it does make it harder to figure out what the answer is.
More important, though, is that the crisis may actually force people to have useful conversations. Political expediency will require that the government not become insolvent, that it not default on its debts, and that it avoid a new international emergency. That way, we can only hope, smart people will rise to the occasion and the old hacks will fall away.
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