Now that the national elections are history, attention in Washington is firmly focused on the “fiscal cliff”: the day of reckoning created by the Congress during the budget ceiling debate in the summer of 2011. When the Super Committee failed in its mandate to create a plan to address the deficits and the national debt, the result was the misnamed Budget Control Act of 2011, which, in current parlance, kicked the budgetary impasse “can” to December 31, 2012. All that act did was to raise the debt limit immediately by $400 billion, thus averting a government shutdown, while allowing further increases in the debt limit without another congressional confrontation with the White House. The tradeoff was the promise of spending cuts in the future.



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