More cliffs to come

'You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel famously told a group of corporate executives a little more than four years ago, when he was President-elect Obama's chief of staff. Emanuel's words apparently have been forgotten in the nation's capital, where lawmakers manufactured a potentially serious crisis by timing billions of dollars of tax cuts to expire at the end of 2012, days before huge across-the-board spending cuts were set to take effect. The deal that the Obama administration struck this week with Congress to avoid sending the country over this so-called fiscal cliff did little more than push the tough bargaining off for another day, when the stakes may actually be higher.

January 3, 2013