Gambling on Armageddon: Final Results

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The Senate just approved the debt ceiling deal and President Obama will sign it later today. That means it’s time to declare a winner from last month’s pool. The three items you had to guess were:

  • When will an agreement be reached?
  • How much will the debt ceiling be increased?
  • Will there be any revenue increases in the deal? How much?

My guesses were August 7, $1.7 trillion, and $200 billion. Not too bad! The correct answer is slightly variable, but assuming that (a) Congress fails to approve a balanced budget amendment and (b) Obama asks for the maximum increase he’s allowed to, the deal raises the debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion. So the winning combination is August 2, $2.1 trillion, and zero.

So who won? Here are the closest guesses:

  • shooter242: August 2, $1 trillion, zero.
  • Model62: August 2, $2 trillion, a little bit via COLA adjustments to tax brackets
  • cld: August 2, “a lot,” zero.
  • Austin_Will: August 1, $1.5 trillion, zero.

In the original post, I defined “a lot” as “the full $2 trillion or so,” so I think that makes cld the winner. Congratulations! And good work from the runners up too. Your non-prizes will not be mailed out to you shortly.

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The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

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