THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

McClatchy doesn't think we need worry about any Grand Bargain in the upcoming budget negotiations, just some small adjustments.

Prospects for a longer-term budget deal in Congress that eases some of the pain from steep spending cuts are good. Prospects for a grand bargain that gets America’s fiscal house in order, well, that’s another story.

Given how far apart the two parties are, the budget bills already passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives have little chance of passage in the other chamber as written. But for the first time since 2009, the committee leaders from each chamber will launch formal negotiations to reconcile the two spending plans. They face a December deadline to frame an agreement, and a Jan. 15 deadline to pass legislation before parts of the government run out of money again.

There, too, there’s little hope for a compromise budget to be agreed on in eight weeks. But there’s optimism that the two sides at least may come up with a smarter version of the austerity that’s already the law of the land.

The across-the-board federal spending cuts made earlier this year, shorthanded as the budget sequester, are hitting a key constituent for both parties: defense contractors and suppliers. Experts think that’s likely to drive some sort of compromise.

“We really don’t have time at this point to do anything like the grand bargain that people are talking about,” said Joe Minarik, the director of research for the Committee for Economic Development, a free-market research center. “It’s not realistic to think that there is going to be any kind of major progress on the big budget problems between now and then.”

A former chief economist for the House Budget Committee, Minarik noted that big legislative achievements such as revamping the tax code or changing the funding structure for Social Security took years of negotiation. Even modest tweaks such as changing the way cost-of-living adjustments are determined for Social Security benefits are likely to remain too heavy a lift for the new budget negotiations.

And hopefully Bernie Sanders will stop any bullshit with Social Security. But any small adjustments are also potentially hazardous. For the last forty years the Republicans have een gnawing away at the framework of the government like a bunch of termites, one small adjustment at a time.