Fiscal Cliff Deal - What's in It, Who's Mad

In a nutshell, everyone is mad, including the Left, but some conservatives see a small silver lining in the deal that went down last night.

Here's what is in it via Fox News (who also links to a list of how House members voted):

• Makes the Bush income tax rates permanent for individuals earning under $400,000 (couples $450,000), although those between $250,000 and $400,000 take deduction hits.
• Raises the income tax rate on individuals over $400,000 (couples over $450,000) from 35% to 39.6%.
• Indexes the Alternative Minimum Tax to inflation to shield nearly 30 million middle and upper-middle income taxpayers from it.
• Raises tax rates on capital gains and dividends — goes from 15% to 20% for incomes over $400,000/$450/000.
• Delays steep spending cuts for Defense for 2 months.
• Raises Estate tax rates on estates over $5 million from 35% to 40%.
• Extends for 1 year federal unemployment benefits.
• Extend for 5 additional years the child tax credit, earned income tax credit and up to $2500 tax credit for college tuition.
• Stops for 1 year a 27% cut in Medicare reimbursement to doctors.
• Restores the FICA (Social Security) payroll tax rate to 6.2% of gross income (from the temporary reduction of 4.2%).

Some on the Right believe conservatives got the best deal they could, given their very limited leverage, and that the Left didn't get as much as it could have.  From Yuval Levin at NRO's The Corner:

But the Democrats could have [done much better], and the story of their failure here has not yet gotten the notice it deserves. In the long run, when the dust has settled, I think that will be the real story of the fiscal cliff. For liberals, this was not a moment of danger to be minimized but by far their best opportunity in a generation for increasing tax rates (which is the only fiscal reform they seem to want) and for robbing Republicans of future leverage for spending and entitlement reforms. And it is likely the best one they will encounter for another generation. ...

If even under the conditions of the past month — with a very liberal president just re-elected, Republicans in disarray, public opinion on taxes seemingly friendlier to them than it has been in decades, and higher tax rates automatically taking effect — the Democrats can’t get more than a tiny pittance of revenue and no chips to use later, then their basic approach to fiscal issues just won’t work. The idea that they will raise rates again in the Obama years when they don’t have all these factors working in their favor is a fantasy. And the notion that the politics of taxes has decisively changed in their favor has been disproven by their own behavior: Many Democratic senators were as relieved as Republicans to see the threshold for higher rates rise well above $250,000, and would not have stood for it dropping below that level to where their upper middle class voters are. Having discovered an effective political wedge in the tax debate, the Democrats have now basically used it up and gotten awfully little in return. They can’t begin to acknowledge that the levels of spending they want to sustain will require a far greater tax burden on far more people (and in a far more regressive way) than today’s code, and if they can’t even state what they want out loud then they’re not likely to get it. Their bluff has been called. The welfare state they want to retain and expand cannot be funded, and they apparently have no way to do anything about that.

John Hinderaker at powerline.com offers this optimistic take on the 'Cliff' deal:

For the last four years, the Obama administration has run up unprecedented deficits, adding more than $4 trillion to the national debt. How has President Obama justified such profligacy? He has been a broken record: his mantra is that we just need to increase taxes on the “wealthy,” restoring them to Clinton-era rates, and then everything will be fine. He has never offered any other plan either to raise revenue, or to control spending. Raising taxes on upper-income taxpayers is the only card in his deck.

But what happens now that Obama has gotten his way? It will soon become apparent that the fiscal cliff deal, including precisely the tax increases that Obama has been demanding for four years, makes hardly a dent in the deficit. At best, it will reduce the deficit by five or six percent. We will continue to run up deficits of close to $1 trillion a year, and the national debt will continue to grow, as Obama has always intended. This fact can’t be hidden; it will be reported. Journalists who have pulled their punches in the past because they wanted Obama to be re-elected will now begin to ask, what are we going to do about the deficit and the debt? At some point, perhaps sooner rather than later, interest rates will begin to rise, at which point the debt issue will become a crisis.