Josh Barro, Columnist

When Getting Your Butt Kicked Is the Strategy

December 28, 2012 at 7:50 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Buzzfeed has one of many pieces about anonymous Republicans bemoaning theirparty's strategic incompetence, this time about the debt ceiling deal. Theyreport:

It’s difficult to find a Republican operativewho is willing to say on the record that going over the fiscal cliff nextTuesday is a good idea. Provoking a crisis is bad politics: Republicans areresigned to taking the blame. And it’s bad for their policy agenda: They willlikely be cornered into a broader tax hike than the best deal they could getfrom President Barack Obama today, and with none of the spending cuts that mightnow be on the table.