Here comes the country's 'Thelma and Louise' moment

IT'S BEEN an 18-month thrill ride across the American Heartland, complete with Texas-size gaffes, a daring flight from substantive issues and finally a Grand Canyonesque cliffhanger.

But now that the story line of "Willard and Barack" has produced a result, is America ready for a "Thelma and Louise"-style bummer of an ending? It's an approaching high-speed plunge off the so-called "fiscal cliff," with a Polaroid snapshot of happier election times presumably floating skyward.

The nation's political conversation now takes a sharp turn toward a man-made crisis that the candidates have been loath to discuss - possible tax increases on all American households, as well as mandatory steep spending cuts, especially in defense, that critics say will crush the plodding economic recovery.

"Going over - and staying over - the cliff would very likely be recessionary," said Jared Bernstein, former chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden, and now an author and economics pundit. "You'd be talking about a contraction in the neighborhood of 4 percent of the gross national product - that is way too much."

In the coming two months, the news hole that was once plugged by the presidential election will instead focus on this: Will a lame-duck Congress decide to do nothing and trigger the tax hikes and spending cuts, or will it cut a deal with President Obama that scales back the budget reductions? One flash point is clear: Obama and congressional Democrats want to raise income taxes on wealthy Americans, and Republicans don't.

If it sounds confusing, it's not much simpler to the politicians and experts involved. It may be the ultimate riddle. How can Washington satisfy Wall Street and voters' demands to reduce the federal deficit, while avoiding the disaster in Europe, where austerity programs of rapid spending cuts triggered double-dip recessions?

Here's a guide:

What exactly is the fiscal cliff? Remember the ugly mess that was the manufactured debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, when America's credit rating took a hit? The tea-party wing of the GOP that brought the nation to the brink of disaster did agree to raise the debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion, but in return for the same amount of cuts.

The plan was doomed almost from the start: Congress and Obama agreed to an initial $1 trillion in reductions, but the bipartisan "Supercommittee" that was supposed to negotiate the other $1.1 trillion in cuts was hopelessly gridlocked. That means cuts will be imposed in January that will be steep, automatic and heavily focused on the Department of Defense - in part to force a deal, since both parties see the military as a "sacred cow." But so far, the plan - known by the bureaucratically daunting term "sequestration" - hasn't worked.

Adam Stulberg, co-director of the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy at Georgia Tech, said the idea was to make the consequences of doing nothing so great that Congress and the president would have to act. "Our politicians have not really understood the game of chicken very well," he said.

So now what? The triggered spending cuts come at the same time that income-tax cuts passed under then-President George W. Bush and extended in 2010 are due to expire again. Obama wants the top marginal rate for households making more than $250,000 to go from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the levy when Bill Clinton was president. Most Republicans have signed a pledge that they won't vote for any tax increase.

Now, Democrats are hoping that the arrival of the first round of sequestration cuts - $110 billion on Jan. 2 - will bring the GOP to the table. If they can't agree, half the reductions will be a sweeping, 9.4 percent cut in the defense budget. Domestic spending would also be slashed, including an $11 billion reduction in Medicare.

How does this play out politically? There's one plan that's increasingly popular with Democrats - that game of chicken in which their party, which controls the Senate and the White House - uses its leverage to let the Bush tax cuts expire, which would mean everyone would see less money in their paycheck starting in January.

But since the taxes would be raised without a vote, Democrats believe they can sell the GOP on a measure that would then lower taxes once again for everyone making less than $250,000 - staying true to their no tax-hike pledge.

"Politics is figuring out the art of the possible," Rep. Chaka Fattah, the Philadelphia Democrat, said in a phone interview, noting that letting all of the Bush tax cuts expire would bring in $3.8 trillion over 10 years, or close to long-term deficit-reduction targets. He suggested that "going off the cliff a little bit" - with the short-term tax hike - would create the framework for a deal with Republicans keen on scaling back the Pentagon cuts.

Shouldn't we be making steep cuts in defense spending anyway? Yes. One prominent expert on the subject - Gordon Adams, a former budget official who oversaw military spending during the Clinton administration and who now teaches foreign policy at American University - said the issue isn't whether the bloated Pentagon can absorb the proposed 9.4 percent budget cut, but how to make such reductions smartly.

"This is not a catastrophe for national security," said Adams, who shakes his head at politicians and the press that treat defense spending as a sacred cow but view cuts in school textbooks or immunizations cavalierly. "It is a management challenge. The sequester is a blunt instrument."

He said the proposed reductions for the military could be fairly painless if the focus is on reforming a wasteful defense-contracting system, reducing ridiculously high noncombat, back-office spending and making intelligent changes to high pension and health-care costs - although he quickly conceded that last area may be an untouchable "third rail" of politics.

Indeed, Washington is not good at making any sort of painful decision, which is how we lurched so quickly from an election to a yawning fiscal abyss in the first place.