After fits and starts, Greece may be on the verge of a deal on its private sector debt. Greece will apparently get the lower interest rate it wanted out of its creditors, though not all of them will participate, and the ECB is refusing to take the same haircut on the debt it holds. Meanwhile Greece is agreeing to impose even more austerity measures, to meet arbitrary debt limits, even though their economy is in depression.

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.

Gingrich never tires of calling Barack Obama a food stamp President, saying that the food stamp rolls increased by the highest amount in history under this Administration. As a technical matter, this is not true. George W. Bush actually put more people on food stamps, and the law that allowed that was passed while Gingrich was Speaker. More interesting, the food stamps program is a success!

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.

Maybe this is the new big plan for the economy: sell as many weapons to the Middle East as possible. Let a million Rosie the Riveters bloom. That this buildup endangers an entire region, one holding the keys to the current energy infrastructure of the world, is just a sidelight to this, I guess.

I have to chuckle at Ron Klain’s story about the subtle genius of the Obama Administration with respect to the payroll tax cut. Klain credits Timothy Geithner (and Gene Sperling, then an advisor to Geithner) with coming up with a strategy that turned a one-year payroll tax cut into what looks to be a two-year one. But remedy for using Making Work Pay to get more money to workers quicker is to double Making Work Pay. It was a $400 benefit; just make it an $800 benefit. If you like, raise the cap.

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.

For the most part David Brooks’ column is a confused diatribe against the Obama administration’s economic policies with a lecture on moral rectitude thrown in for good measure. He starts by condemning the efforts to stimulate the economy, which he misrepresents. Then it gets worse.

When the payroll tax was first proposed last year I thought it was an inherently bad idea. While the economy needed a stimulus, it should never have taken the form of messing with the basic social contract that is the foundation of our social safety net.

The GOP doesn’t seem to want to extend the payroll tax cut, because it might improve the economy a bit next year. But they cannot just come out and say that they want to tank the economy to make it easier for candidate Romney or Gingrich. So now they’re claiming to be worried about the effect on the Social Security Trust Fund.