Deal or no deal, budget edition

>>> in president obama 's meet with house republicans yesterday, they took the rare opportunity to ask hard questions like, why don't you balance the budget just like families do? does your family print money and have nuclear weapons? and what about those white house tours ? really? that's your biggest concern over sequestration? one reported exchange, though, did stand out. ways & means chairman dave camp asked the president why they couldn't just go ahead and pass cpi benefit cuts to social security and means testing for medicare since the president has said he would be willing to accept both of these changes? i'm going to give chairman camp the benefit of the doubt and assume he was being intentionally dense. the president claimed these were items offered as part of a negotiation and republicans would also have to give up something in order to grab their social safety net cut goodies. in other words, he explained what has been the operating framework for a potential grand bargain for, i don't know, the last three years. increasingly, though, democrats are asking themselves if the grand bargain is even something that they want at all. is there anything they could possibly get from house republicans that would be worth these cuts to social programs? so what's changed in their thinking? first, let's keep a couple things in mind. the whole idea of a grand bargain is really republican deficit hawks can see, one democrats were forced into accepting after the gop wave election of 2010 but are finding a bit tougher to swallow now. shouldn't we really be focusing on jobs for now? infrastructure and investment for the future? even the more budget balancing inclined the democratic caucus is starting to look at the numbers and say, hey, actually the deficit is coming down at a pretty good clip. deficit peaked in 2009 and has, in fact, been falling rapidly since then. despite what republicans would have you believe, democrats don't love racing taxes just for the sake of raising taxes . we do so in the service of creating a fairer tax code , funding investments for the future and in the service of a balanced approach to deficit reduction. if you take out the deficit reduction concerns and lord knows that any sort of invest investment spending right now is not going to pass muster with the house republicans, you're left with the fairness motive. a more just system would certainly be nice, does it offset the injustice of cutting benefits to folks who rely on social security ? to scuttle a brand bargain deal, though, democrats need some sort of political cover. hmm. if only some republican would put out a really toxic, extreme, ideological plan that democrats could point to as continuing republican intransigence, they could walk away with not political consequence. you know, i think i know just the guy. all