Even if Mr Boehner’s plan scrapes through the House, Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, says it is “dead on arrival” in his chamber: his entire caucus has signed a letter opposing it. Not only does it set the stage for another crisis just a few months from now, Democrats complain, but it also rigs future negotiations on reducing the deficit in the Republicans’ favour. The White House, too, is threatening a veto.

　　That is the state of play. The fact that Mr Boehner’s plan is too extreme for the Democrats in the Senate and too mild for many Republicans in the House shows how hard it will be to get any other scheme approved by both chambers. Mr Reid has proposed one, which would cut spending by $2.4 trillion or so and raise the debt ceiling by the same amount, enough to keep the government going past next year’s elections. But Republicans don’t like it because almost half of the savings come from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—something that was already on the cards. Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, has a scheme to transfer the authority to raise the debt ceiling to the president, which would at least spare Republicans the embarrassment of voting for an increase, even if it does not cut the deficit at all. And there is lots of talk about a short-term increase, if no lasting plan can be agreed on.

　　In the end, the leaders of the two chambers are likely to put some sort of amalgam of all these plans to a vote, and can probably wring enough votes out of their underlings to secure passage. Mr Obama, for his part, would presumably sign any bill that had won the approval of the Democrats in the Senate. The alternative, most observers assume, is simply too horrible: payments withheld from pensioners, soldiers, government contractors and the like, higher interest rates, chaos in the financial markets and the harm to an already sickly economy that all this would bring.

　　So far the markets have shown only muted signs of disquiet. Stock prices have continued their slow but steady downward drift of the past week. The dollar slipped against some safer currencies, especially the Swiss franc. The price of insuring against an American default rose. And in auctions of government debt this week, the cost the American government pays to borrow ticked up ever so slightly. But these mild movements seem predicated on the assumption that Congress will pull a rabbit out of a hat within the next few days. The longer the rabbit takes to appear, however, the less quiescent the markets will become. And even if the debt ceiling is raised, ratings agencies are still threatening to downgrade America’s debt—because the long-term fiscal outlook is so grim.

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