New Jambangle department: 'grand bargain hunting'

Now that the election is over, we've already been introduced to the Next Big Thing in politics. Turns out it's one of the previous Big Things: the so-called Grand Bargain. This is the name that's gotten attached to the on-again, off-again attempt to exchange cuts to entitlement programs (the democratic concession to the bargain) for higher taxes (the republican concession). The bargain-hunting impulse has manifested itself most recently in Obama's Deficit Commission, chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson; in the scuttled 2011 debt deal between Obama and Boehner, effectively chronicled by Matt Bai in the Paper of Record; and in the 'fiscal cliff' that will loom larger and larger in the media imagination - like this - as a December deadline for automatic spending cuts and tax increases approaches.

The Simpson-Bowles Commission, also known as "The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform" (its formal name) or 'The Catfood Commission" (the derisive moniker chosen by some of its critics), established our bipartisan commitment to the mania for deficit reduction and entitlement reform. There are many questions to ask about just how bad it is for sovereign, currency-creating states to run deficits, what kind of shape social security is actually in and what it would take to fix it, who stands to gain from the most popular schemes for reforming public programs (here's a hint: who would want to take money that would go to a public program and divert it into something that earns someone a commission?), and just what it means for Democrats, in a tradition stretching back at least to Clinton and Robert Rubin, to thumb their noses at the New Deal in the pursuit of bipartisanship, or in pursuit of the post-public-service goodies they get for pursuing certain forms of bipartisanship while in office.

So we here at Jambangle hereby introduce a new addition to our recurring offerings. Alongside 'Y'all should be 'shamed" and 'Today's Links' and 'What [blank] looks like,' we will have (hopefully) regular updates on 'grand bargain hunting.' The name is negotiable - if you have ideas, please share them - but whatever we call it, we will be watching.