Larry Beinhart: Three Things You Have to Know About the "Fiscal Cliff". l

Obama won, Romney lost. That is a crisis averted and a very good thing, but the contest is hardly over. The election was essentially an intermission in a long drama over economics. What's going to happen in the upcoming act? A sharp change? Muddled compromise? A new stalemate? According to the coming attractions, the episode up next is a really big action scene: The Fiscal Cliff! Here's the action. Three vehicles, plus some scooters along for the trip, are all racing straight toward a cliff! They have no brakes! If any of them go over the edge, according to promotional videos on the action news, it will hurt the whole economy, slow our growth and plunge us into a recession. If they all go over together, it will be really, really, super bad. The biggest one, visualize it as Tony Soprano's Cadillac Escalade, is the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Vehicle number two has less than half the weight. It's the expiration of Obama's Social Security tax cut, an everyman's sort of car, call it a Ford Taurus. The third is a pick up truck. A simple one, a bit smaller than the Taurus, But! What you gotta worry about is the payload in the back! Tanks of propane! If this baby hits the ground it blows up in everybody's face. Especially the face of your local congress person. The bomb is sequestration. That's a misappropriated term, but in this case, it means that the failure to reach a deficit cutting deal launches an instant spending cut of approximately $100 billion. Like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, shrieking "off with their heads," it lops 8 percent off the top of all discretionary spending. Discretionary spending is the money we spend inspecting food, testing drugs, running federal courts, running the FBI, DEA and the Border Patrol, supporting education, doing research, maintaining national parks, keeping airplanes from colliding, and collecting taxes. Roughly 9 percent will also be cut from military spending. These cuts will not be done surgically. No thought, planning, care, or precision will go into the process. It will be done Grim Reaper style, swing the scythe and slash everything in the way. Those are the big three. The other financial events on the same schedule include the Affordable Care Act, aka Obama-care, which can be regarded as a new tax, "other" tax provisions that come to an end, the unemployment benefits extension ends, and the rates Medicare pay will go down.