“I feel very confident, it was reiterated multiple times tonight, that the President is not going to negotiate about the full faith and credit of the country,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). “If they choose to create a situation where our country cannot pay its bills, that’s their decision.”

“What they did in summer of 2011 was the most irresponsible thing that’s happened in my years in politics, where they were willing to freeze investment in the country for weeks and weeks and weeks, inject such uncertainty in the economy and hurt job creation,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). “I know they talk about doing it again, but we’re simply not going to negotiate with those kinds of tactics, because it’s clearly damaging.”

via Dems Steel Themselves For Debt Limit Staredown After Fiscal Cliff Agreement | TPMDC.

This will be curious to see if they can stick to their guns.  The Debt Ceiling Debacle of last summer *was* a huge embarrassment, and negotiating with hostage takers should *never* be the MO of a respectable government.

As regards the deal with the fiscal cliff, my summary is below.

So….regarding the “Fiscal Cliff” resolution….pretty much exactly as I said it would happen.

The sick thing about this, though, and it highlights how skewed the media conversation is vs. the real world…pretty much every single one of my friends will see their paychecks shrink and their taxes go up as a part of this deal. Why’s that, you ask? I though it was about raising taxes on the wealthy?!

Well…that’s part of it. The other part was a 2% payroll tax cut that was part of the much-dismissed-and-even-less-understood Stimulus deal passed to fight the recession. While the Tea Party nutjobs were complaining about socialists and communists, the President fought for, passed, and extended a payroll tax cut for the last three years.

This tax cut was never likely to be extended, and this is facepalm part….BECAUSE REPUBLICANS DIDN’T CONSIDER IT A REAL TAX CUT.

They never wanted to see it extended, Gover didn’t count it, it wasn’t even on their radar.

This is the big disconnect. Multiple media sources are talking about how “tax rates stay the same on the middle class”…and this is true…but payroll taxes are going back to 6.3% from 4.3% on the first $106,000 earned.

So most of my friends (and myself) are going to see 2% smaller paychecks in a couple weeks.

And just to be very, very, very clear. The Republicans spent 0 (zero, none, zilch) time trying to extend the payroll tax cuts. All of their energy was focused on extending the tax cuts for high earners (who don’t even have to pay payroll taxes on their unearned income). I’m guessing, as a consistent watcher of this charade, that when people see their paychecks shrink, and they hear about “tax rates going up”, there are going to be more than a few talking heads (mostly on Fox), that try to convince a lot of these working folks that it was *them* Obama wanted to raise taxes on, and it is *them* Obama considers the wealthy.

So when you start to hear the lamentations in a couple of weeks, and the misplaced blame, try to keep it in context.

Good luck with that.

Note: my prediction from last week.

And.. the fallout of the “debt debacle” a couple summer’s ago.