A good moment for a grand bargain?

I take Digby's skepticism of grand bargains seriously. I also think that many in the GOP are cynically leveraging the deficit to argue for conservative policy priorities. As we've seen a couple of times now, when deficit reduction comes into conflict with tax cuts, tax cuts win. They win, in fact, every time, and have won every time since Ronald Reagan.

But that doesn't mean the deficit isn't a real problem. My best guess is we have something like five to eight years where we can sustain both the debt load we're carrying now and the debt load we're projected to be carrying in the future. And even before then, interest on the debt is getting a little nuts. As Steve Mufson notes: "Starting in 2014, net interest payments will surpass the amount spent on education, transportation, energy and all other discretionary programs outside defense. In 2018, they will outstrip Medicare spending. Only the amounts spent on defense and Social Security would remain bigger under the president's plan." The graph atop this post -- click on it to make it larger -- tells a similar story.

So I think the question is whether we want to deal with that debt now or later. At the moment, the White House is occupied by Barack Obama, and the Senate is led by Harry Reid. It's possible that the composition of the government will be friendlier than that to progressives in six or eight years, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it. Democrats look likely to face a rough couple of election cycles in the Senate, and even assuming Obama gets reelected, it's fairly rare for the same party to hold the presidency for more than eight years.

Which is all to say that if you think a deal on deficit reduction has to happen at some point, this might be a better moment than most. That doesn't mean that the plans that people propose should be accepted uncritically, or even accepted at all. That'll depend on the policy recommendations they contain. But it's not an obviously bad context for a grand bargain.