The White House released to the Washington Postwhat amounts to an opening bid for fiscal slope/grand bargain talks. It turns out that this is actually just what was in the President’s proposed 2013 budget. But since it does add up to $4 trillion over 10 years, and since everyone’s getting serious about negotiations, we can take a closer look at it.

The House passed a six-month spending bill that will keep the lights on in government agencies until March 2013. Democrats and Republicans made a bet that the next Congress will find more favorable terrain for them, and kicked any contentious spending issues into it. They may do the same on the fiscal cliff, but there’s not likely to be any action there until the lame duck session, when they’ll know the outcome of the elections. So the calculus could change there.

It’s not the threat of recession from the fiscal cliff that is despairing so much as it’s the CBO estimate that, even if the fiscal cliff gets put off, we’re staring at anemic 1.7% growth for 2013, and an unemployment rate remaining above 8% by the end of next year. This points to some serious problems with the US economy, and being the “best in the world” at a time of global slowdown is a cold comfort.

Following up on a previous item, Congressional leaders have indeed agreed to a 6-month stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown at the end of September. It continues current funding. However, the votes won’t be help until after the August recess, so the agreement may unravel by then.

House and Senate leaders continue to work on a stopgap spending bill to close out the year, and could announce it as early as today. The bill would extend a continuing resolution on the budget for a mere six months, until the end of March 2013. But they won’t bother to pass it until September, at the earliest leaving a narrow window before the elections.

With conservatives in retreat, it does look like we’ll get a six-month stopgap spending bill that will put off any budget hostage-taking until next March.

House conservatives are running away from one spending fight, asking Eric Cantor to schedule a vote on a stopgap spending bill that would push any budget fight well into 2013.

Stan Collender, one of Washington’s major budget guru, reports that even getting the basic business of Congress done by pre-election deadlines could prove impossible. The basic issue here is that the current budget runs out on September 30. Given the election year, nobody expects a new budget deal by that deadline.

Bloomberg has the story of an emerging deal to extend virtually all fiscal issues that kick in at the end of the year into March 2013, and throwing in the fiscal 2013 budget along with it. There are reasons to believe this is a good policy idea and also reasons to believe this is bad politics.