USA TODAY: …Partisan divisions and brinksmanship politics defined the outgoing Congress right up to the final scramble to avoid the “fiscal cliff.” The last-ditch deal dodged income-tax hikes for nearly all Americans and delayed for two months spending cuts for the Pentagon and domestic programs.
Still, the compromise didn’t solve, or even seriously address, the deficit problems that prompted Congress to write the laws that nearly forced the nation over the cliff in the first place.
“This was the overture for the opera that’s to come,” says Robert Reischauer, a veteran of Washington’s budget wars, “and that opera’s going to be a lot more discordant than the overture was.” The new Congress starts at noon Thursday… (more)
