Deficit Talks Upshot: Neither Political Party Won While Americns Lost Big Time

Although the links between the excruciatingly slow recovery from the Bush Recession and the record-high federal budget deficit are to an extent incidental, it is sadly ironic that an upshot of the deficit cap compromise hammered out on Sunday is that less money will be invested in the economy, which is to say the nation's future prosperity, and the recovery could bog down even more.

While the Republican hard heads who forced a compromise in which President Obama and Democrats can take no pride would deny they are imperiling an already shaky recovery, that is exactly what they have done even if the cuts are on the small side in 2012 and don't begin mounting up until 2013 and 2014. The only bright note is that there will be long overdue Pentagon cuts.

It is incumbent on the president and his party to hammer the imperiling-the-economy line home in the run-up to the 2012 campaign as a counterweight to depressing jobs creation numbers.

But then why did the president and his party capitulate to the tune of $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years, as well as gladly kick the can down the road on where most of those cuts will be coming from?

Obama would blame Tea Partiers at every impasse in deficit negotiations, but he own leadership was wanting.

He said on Sunday night that the compromise "begins to lift the cloud of debt and the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over the economy," but if anything the uncertainty will grow because he was unwilling to stick to his guns, whatever they were.

The economy grew no faster than the population during the first six months of the year in part because of spending cuts at the state and local levels, and now the feds are piling on to. If timing is everything, in this case it truly sucks.