The Obama administration officially released its budget for fiscal year 2013 yesterday. it’s basically a long, vaguely political document that is effectively meaningless, dead on arrival in Congress, another package of ideas destined to go nowhere. The reason isn’t just GOP obstructionism; the Democrats could have passed much of the Obama agenda when they had very large majorities in both houses, but they chose not to.

When you have the kind of power Grover Norquist has held — namely, decades of unquestioned dictatorial control over the Republican Party as its grand ayatollah of anti-tax orthodoxy — it’s easy for a wee bit of hubris to creep into your thinking. The result is the occasional burst of excessive honesty, as exemplified by [...]

I’ve noticed this tension among politicians for a while. On the one hand, they want to say that they favor a “simpler” tax code, and they like to talk about how many thousands of pages the tax code is, and how byzantine it is to understand, etc. At the same time, they boast about all the goodies they give out to this or that business or individual using the tax code, which of course only makes it more complex.

It’s worth mapping out what will be the biggest stories to chronicle in 2012, what I’ll be looking toward.

In case you weren’t paying attention during the debate about the extension of the Bush tax cuts last year, members of Congress are again working on a deal to clearly show there is no such thing as a deficit hawk.

Now that the Super Committee has failed — or succeeded — by doing nothing, the media are starting to notice that doing nothing would slash the federal deficits far more that anything the Committee, Catfood Commissions or White House have been proposing.

President Obama promised to veto any Congressional attempt to undo the trigger of spending cuts from the Super Committee’s failure. But he’s left unclear how Congress can be induced to renew unemployment benefits or other stimulus measures.

The deadline for the Super Committee to complete its recommendations for deficit reduction is Wednesday, November 23. Realistically, they’ve already passed that deadline, because any agreement must go to the Congressional Budget Office for scoring. I guess Monday is the real deadline for that scoring process. So they plan to work through the weekend to try and salvage something. Considering how things have gone in the previous several weeks, I don’t think the last few days will amount to much.

An article planted by Republican operatives looking to absolve their party of blame for failure on the Super Committee suggests that the rank and file are being persuaded to accept tax increases as part of an overall deal. The entire premise of the article is wrong, because it posits as a “tax increase” a deal that would cut taxes by $3.3 trillion

The Occupy Wall Street movement has succeeded in changing the focus of Washington’s economic attention from deficit and debts to questions of economic justice and jobs. The President’s pivot to jobs hasn’t gotten a single jobs bill through Congress, but the changed conversation has killed the momentum of the Super Committee and created predictions of its failure.