The FY 2013 budget that the Administration will release today is, in the long run, a meaningless document in substantive terms, so I don’t want to spend that much time on it. But I was a little surprised with the pushback I received about my assessment that it reflects a shift in tone rather than policy. It’s a simple fact that the Administration has wanted a deficit deal for some time, and that this budget will build in a deficit deal. They’re going about it in a smarter way with a higher bid in the negotiations.

The jobs programs and higher taxes on the wealthy are at the top of the priority list. But all of the elements that the Administration has sought from the beginning of their term – a total of $4 trillion in deficit reduction, the “lower the rate, broaden the base” perspective on corporate taxes, an extension of the Bush tax cuts for 98% of the population, still remain in this document. We’re really talking about tone.

Austerity is a major issue abroad, particularly Europe, but it has more to do with the sclerotic economic pace in the US than most people realize. Republicans successfully got spending caps that will ratchet down the budget in years to come, and they’ve already effectively frozen it. But as Jared Bernstein and Krugman show, the bigger contribution to austerity comes from state and local budgets.

We’ve seen several retrospectives of the Administration’s actions to deal with the economic crisis in 2009-2010, and Ryan Lizza has a new one in the New Yorker. His recounting of the memos and exchanges between Larry Summers and Obama add to the view of Summers inducing Obama to pull his punches for political reasons, ensuring the stimulus would be too small.

Maybe we need a “Ya Think?” of the day, going to the article that shows the best grasp of the obvious. If so, the article with the headline In Greece, fears that austerity is killing the economy would win.

Paul Krugman today patiently explains that short-term accumulations of federal debt simply do not create the disastrous effects claimed by those who want to prevent any progressive economic policymaking. The cries of the crumbling of the Republic due to overhangs of debt simply are not true.

This week, the White House will ask Congress for the second tranche of increases to the debt limit, as negotiated in the August deal. The conditions for the second debt limit increase have been satisfied by the pulling of the trigger, caused by the collapse of the Super Committee. Republicans can only stop this second increase through a “resolution of disapproval,” a vote that the President can then veto. But that deal also constrains how much deficit spending occurs this fiscal year, and thus the “pay-fors” for any stimulus measure.

Lawmakers agreed last night to a $1 trillion omnibus spending package, which will fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year, until September 30, 2012. The agreement eliminates some but not all of the policy riders that Republicans coveted in the deal.

There are several ways in which the Defense Department’s extended whine about automatic sequestration cuts to their base budget is a joke, but the White House has apparently sniffed out one of those ways. The Overseas Contingency budget has quickly become a slush fund for the Pentagon. Many earmarked to go toward operations in Iraq and Afghanistan often ends up paying for cherished Pentagon programs. The White House wants to put a stop to this.

So let’s break this down. To pay for a tax cut that will hopefully increase consumer demand and help increase hiring, Republicans would – 1) fire hundreds of thousands of people, 2) freeze their pay (the opposite effect of a payroll tax cut, which operates as a wage increase), 3) put no-strings, volunteer peer pressure on millionaires to pay additional taxes (I’m sure there will be a high takeup for that), 4) means test a number of programs to ghetto-ize them as welfare, including unemployment benefits, which is particularly cruel, because once federal benefits kick in and you’ve been out of work 6 months, it doesn’t matter what you earned before, you’re in trouble.