Not what John Lennon imagined on Abbey Road

‘Come together’ breaks Washington apart

By Ezra Klein , WashPost, Updated: December 28, 2012

Twitter has been rather amused by Starbucks’ plan to solve the fiscal cliff by scrawling “come together” on every peppermint mocha and salted caramel latte sold in the Beltway.

But I want to take the project a bit more seriously. I should say, at the outset, that I admire the effort: People and CEOs should want to be engaged in American politics, they should be angry at what they see happening and they should be trying to figure out ways to pressure politicians to make things work better.

But the specific sentiment — what you might call the ideology of “come togetherism” — is, ironically, one of the big reasons that nothing in Washington ever seems to get solved and that the two sides never seem to come together.

I think the way to start here is by being specific. So here are three facts about the budget debate we’ve been having over the last couple of years.

1) Simpson-Bowles, the bipartisan debt reduction plan that’s often held up as the platonic ideal of coming together is, by any reasonable accounting, far to the left of anything the White House has ever proposed. It’s got $2.6 trillion in tax increases. That’s more than twice as much as what the White House is asking for. It’s got more defense cuts than the administration ever even considered.

(More here.)