Unbalanced Inputs Yield Unbalanced Outputs

Nate Silver has what I think is a very good article addressing the question of whether the budget deal was more favorable to Republicans than it should have been, given that Democrats control, you know, two of the three institutions in the legislative process. He makes the point that the deal reached was probably for considerably fewer budget cuts than the median member of the House actually would've liked. Perhaps it was not as far to the left of that median-Representative-preferred position as it should have been, he says, given how far to the left of that goalpost the President and the median Senator are. But it's unreasonable, he says, to argue that because Obama ended up with more cuts than John Boehner's original request he caved more than 100%.

I'd go a step further. I think that not only did the median member of the House want more cuts than they got but also the median member of the House had a very different priority structure than the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House (and also than John Boehner himself, which Nate alludes to). Specifically the incentive to compromise was a lot weaker. Why? Because the alternative to compromise was a government shutdown, which a) liberals think would be even more macroeconomically disastrous than spending cuts, b) John Boehner thought would damage his reputation as Speaker considerably, and c) Tea Party-style Republicans, who right now think that the federal government is quite simply in the business of doing evil, might even have preferred to simple budget cuts, and though that's a bit of a stretch it's certainly clear that a whole lot of Representatives didn't disprefer a shutdown very emphatically. That means, of course, that they ought to be in a stronger negotiating position, because their threshhold for how much of their own way they need to get before they're willing to take the deal is naturally a lot higher than their adversaries. The House, the Senate, and the President are all veto players in this game: any one of these institutions could, in this instance, force a shutdown. Since the weapon each side wielded was the shutdown, it follows that the side most willing to use its weapon would end up with the best result. I never thought we were going to win this budget battle. Elections have consequences, people: elect a House comprised of radical Republicans, and you're going to get policies that look kind of radical and Republican.