“Goldman’s Alec Phillips warns that the upcoming fight over lifting the debt ceiling could be harder than the 2012 fight, which was brutal and confidence crushing.
Phillips writes:
Unfortunately, the upcoming increase may be more difficult to enact than the increase in 2011. Few spending cuts had been enacted before the previous increase, which left lawmakers with several areas of the budget from which to pull potential savings. Congress eventually settled on $2.1 trillion in spending cuts, essentially all coming from a reduction in spending appropriated by Congress (about $900bn from caps on “discretionary” spending, and $1.2 trillion from “sequestration”). While hardly non-controversial, these cuts did not affect specific programs but instead capped overall spending, thus reducing political opposition. The fiscal agreement Congress just passed increases revenues by about $600bn over 10 years (compared with a full extension of expiring income tax cuts), and while this second round of savings was much more controversial than the first, a majority of the public supported the tax increase, which was targeted on high incomes.
More specifically. Suppose the Congress wants to raise the debt ceiling by $1 trillion, then that means an addition $1 trillion in cuts must be found….”
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