What he means by the "dual trigger" plan -- strictly speaking a non-plan except in the nth dimensional chess sense, and I mean that in a good way -- is that if Congress does absolutely nothing (which is what it does best when GOP obstructionists are in the majority in the House and force usually-unattainable supermajorities in the Senate) then the Bush tax cuts will expire and the "triggers" imposed by the failure of the "Super Committee" will begin to go boom in January 2013, just before Obama is inaugurated for his second term, after trouncing that lying flip-flopping super-rich Snidely Sniderson automaton everybody hates, especially the Dominionist fundies and Randroid-libertopian fundies of the GOP base, the one because of their anti-Mormon bigotry the other because of their anti-Romeycare hysteria.
I have found myself thinking of what Klein delineates as a Dual Trigger Non-Plan kinda sorta Plan instead as "Obama's Silver Hammer." Here's why: It goes BANG BANG, that's why.
There are, to be sure, as there always are, plenty of things to complain about in the fact that the end of the Bush tax cuts as is will include marginally less effective and more painful increasing in taxes for more than only the rich (Democrats would want to target the rich more selectively) and in the fact that some of the "triggered" spending cuts will hit actually good and useful and stimulative public spending (again, the Democratic scalpel would be more precise), however the focus on Defense cuts and protection of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in the already agreed-upon trigger package reflects Democratic priorities amazingly better than anything they could subsequently negotiate in any case.
When Klein posted first on the implications of the "Dual Trigger" Atrios chimed cynically in (I've fiddled with order of his post editorially, follow the link for the original): "Not sure why we're forgetting the cards Republicans have... Government shutdowns, debt ceiling showdowns... So Many Hostages."
He is right, of course, that one never goes far wrong predicting Democrats will capitulate their way to ruin, but I do think such thinking tends to ignore the differences between 2010 and 2012. It's true that Republican hostage taking managed to keep the ruinous Bush tax cuts for the rich intact for two years and they were happy to think they would be able to manage the feat again in an election year, which is why they agreed to the deal.
But in 2010 Democrats were faced with the loss of control of Congress to Republican obstructionism and the deal enabled Obama to get a wan and imperfect second stimulus against all odds, extending unemployment benefits and providing tuition credits and small business incentives for many Americans as the Recession otherwise deepened (largely because obviously better government interventions and remedies and supports were nixed by monolithically obstructionist Republicans and the handful of icky conservadems emboldened by the cover provided by these Republicans) but also the signature lgbtq civil rights victories of Obama's first term, the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell and the pivot toward support of gay marriage.
There is nothing a comparable deal could get Obama in 2012, Republicans won't offer him anything worth paying for, and if anything he is likely to have a better Congress after 2012 than before so he might as well wait for it. Both the debt ceiling fight and the serial American Jobs Act battles have been trial balloons demonstrating that Republicans were far too smug when they fancied they would come out ahead if the 2012 campaign is indeed framed around making people pay for a government that actually works for everybody instead of for the few.
If, as Atrios fears, Republicans decide to shut down the government for the right to screw over the middle class some more and lard the rich with more privileges, it doesn't take a genius to see that a Nation turning the page from the Summer of Tea to the year of Occupy is going to give Obama coattails to keep the Senate (maybe this time Democrats will have the sense to alter the filibuster rule) and regain the House in yet another wave election. Such a Congress can tinker with the aftermath of the dual triggers to reflect Democratic priorities even better.
To return to Obama's Silver Hammer, for a moment, I have no doubt that there will be plenty to pooh-pooh in the details of this outcome, and the larger context of the macroeconomic stupidity of focusing on long-term debt rather than government stimulus at the zero lower bound as well as the ethical sin of advocating austerity in the midst of obscene wealth concentration and plutocratic failure and fraud ensure that there is plenty to rail about even if practically best outcomes prevails given their obscene distance from optimally-best and yet still eminently-doable best outcomes. But before we leap off into such critiques -- it really does pay to look at the distance between what the Republicans really wanted and still want to implement and what will be implemented instead through the triggers painstakingly and cleverly orchestrated by the Obama administration and Democratic Congressional Leadership.
Just look at the evil stupid Republican wet-dream of the Ryan budget which all the Republicans are on record as signing onto as their own, which incredibly proposes still more tax cuts for the richest of the rich (on the sick sad stupid sociopathic randroidal fantasy theory that rich people are the only "job creators" and the rest of us just litter their world and should settle gratefully for the scraps they occasionally flick our way or starve to death in quiescent silence), while privatizing, looting, and dismantling the inadequate but real healthcare and financial reforms shepherded through by Obama and his Do-Something 111th Congress, as well as the tattered remains of the Great Society and the New Deal the Republican Party has hated and hunted throughout its modern existence. Meanwhile, should we find ourselves in the aftermath of the triggers, we find an outcome in which the cuts (largely from surreally bloated Defense spending) are dwarfed by revenues coming in from a considerably more progressive tax code.
My point is not just to say that what we get with the triggers is better than what we get from Republicans (indeed, better than any other actually existing proposal -- apart from the best proposal of all, the one by the Progressive Caucus, which Klein did not but should have included in his chart even if it blunted the rhetorical force of the point he was trying to make in my opinion), neither is my point just to say that what we get with the triggers is so much better than what we get from Republicans that it literally dramatically inverts the sick skewed priorities of the Randroid Ryan Republicans, but my point is to say all that and also that the priorities implemented by the dual trigger non-plan plan (Obama's Silver Hammer) painstakingly orchestrated by the Democrats actually better reflects the priorities of a country that makes any kind of comparatively sustainable equitable policy sense, and given the madness and distress of this historical moment -- reasonable criticisms of the specifics in their legions notwithstanding -- such an outcome would really amount to a flabbergasting accomplishment, all things considered. I mentioned Klein's table, which makes all this quite clear already, and here it is:
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