I guess no one should be surprised.

Yglesias:

Just last week I was trying to convince people that the administration had a new spirit of resolve on the debt ceiling question. Over the past year, I've repeatedly heard from administration officials both senior and junior that their on-the-record posture of no renewed negotiations on the debt ceiling is not a bluff. They've shown charts and graphs of how damaging they think the last standoff was to the economy, and made it a centerpiece of their story about why the recovery seemed to stall out for a while in 2011. Routinized hostage-taking was, they said, genuinely dangerous to the American economy.

But then it's emerged this week that they didn't really mean it. The debt ceiling is just another issue in the mix along with tax rates and benefit formulae and tax reform commissions and all the rest. One more pawn on the chessboard.

The problems with this are twofold. One is that their analysis about the danger of the debt ceiling is correct. Another is that by backing down after having invested time and energy in convincing people that they won't back down, the administration is going to make it much harder for themselves to be credible the next time around. There are two reasonable ways to handle the debt ceiling. One is to achieve a permanent solution as part of the resolution of the fiscal cliff. The other is to completely ignore it in the resolution of the fiscal cliff, and then have the president wage and win a total victory on a separate debt ceiling battle. Delaying the debt ceiling crisis until some time in 2015 as part of a larger bargain merely institutionalizes the idea that the debt ceiling is a bargaining chip and entrenches the idea that the president will cave.

Another area of compromise is in Social Security benefits cuts. Oh, they try to make it sound like a purely technical change to "chained CPI". But what does that really mean? Krugman:

Switching from the regular CPI to the chained CPI doesn't affect benefits immediately after retirement, which are based on your past earnings.What it does mean is that after retirement your payments grow more slowly, about 0.3 percent each year. So if you retire at 65, your income at 75 would be 3 percent less under this proposal than under current law; at 85 it would be 6 percent less; there's supposedly a bump-up in benefits for people who make it that far.

This is not good; there's no good policy reason to be doing this, because the savings won't have any significant impact on the underlying budget issues. And for many older people it would hurt. Also, the symbolism of a Democratic president cutting Social Security is pretty awful.

It's possible these are just trial balloons. Previously they floated the idea of raising the eligibility age for Medicare and backed away from it when everyone screamed. Consider this to be me adding my scream to the chorus against these latest "ideas", for whatever it's worth.