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In his post-mortem on the fiscal cliff negotiations, David Leonhardt argues that President Obama’s incentives throughout were to reduce inequality. In that light, he writes, the deal was a success.

New York -- In response to the late night passage of a tax deal by the US House of Representatives, Miles Rapoport, president of the national nonpartisan public policy organization Demos released the following statement:

"It is in the nature of a complicated bipartisan agreement that it looks very different depending on what prism you look at it through.  Two elements are critically important: what is actually in the bill that passed and the President will sign, and how its passage ‘sets up’ the future fiscal debates.

It is in the nature of a complicated bipartisan agreement that it looks very different depending on what prism you look at it through.  Two elements are critically important: what is actually in the bill that passed and the president will sign, and how its passage ‘sets up’ the future fiscal debates.

This is the headline we should really be seeing after last night's fiscal cliff deal.

As a result of the deal, the bulk of the Bush tax cuts will remain permanently in place, the AMT will be eliminated, and Obama's stimulus tax cuts, mainly aimed at the working poor, will live on for another five years (as well as stimulus tax cuts for business.)

Now that the future revenue path is pretty clear for the next decade, I took another look at President Obama's 2013 budget, which projects spending and revenue through 2022 on the assumption -- a correct one, it turns out -- that taxes will only rise on the affluent. 

While tax hikes on the affluent have gotten most of the attention in the fiscal cliff deal, an equally important story is how proposals for further stimulus spending died a quiet death in Washington over recent weeks.

Though technology and innovation have squeezed trading costs, the industry's profits are accounting for a bigger share of U.S. GDP, a former Goldman banker says, needlessly diverting some $635 bln from the broader economy. It lends credence to ideas like a transaction tax.

Political scientists who study Congress, like the scholar Douglas Arnold, have long argued that while money matters in politics, legislators ultimately tend to be responsive to their constituents. 

Dylan Matthews posted a fascinating interview with law professor Barak Orbach yesterday, which goes a long way toward explaining the current withered state of antitrust law.