* Liberals: It doesn't raise taxes enough. In its email to members Tuesday afternoon, MoveOn pointed out that Obama campaigned on a promise to raise taxes on income over $250,000 -- only to relent and allow a final bill with a $450,000 ceiling instead. The result is that the vast majority of the tax cuts proposed by President Bush in 2001-03, all of which were set to expire, have been permanently enshrined in the tax code. The deal also permanently locks in low rates for the estate tax and capital gains tax, and brings in just $600 billion in new revenue in the next decade. That's a fraction of the $1.6 trillion Obama initially sought; it's even less than the $800 billion Boehner originally offered the president. As a matter of negotiating strategy, many on the left believe Obama could have held his ground and forced the GOP's hand. By compromising, they say, he's forfeited the most significant position of leverage he's ever likely to have. "I can't help [but] believe the president could have done better than this," former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote. "After all, public opinion is overwhelmingly on his side. Republicans would have been blamed had no deal been achieved."

* Conservatives: It doesn't cut spending enough. Despite passing the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support, by a vote of 89-8, the deal spent much of Tuesday in limbo as House Republicans revolted. They were egged on by groups like FreedomWorks and the Heritage Foundation, which portrayed the deal as consisting almost entirely of tax hikes with little in the way of spending cuts to balance them out. FreedomWorks called it "a typical, Washington-insider deal: ... Increase taxes, and increase spending. If this so-called deal passes the House, we are in big trouble as the Senate-passed bill increases already insane deficit spending." RedState founder Erick Erickson proclaimed, "The Republican Establishment in Washington, DC should be burned to the ground and salt spread on the remains." The deal punts on the GOP priorities of tax and entitlement reform, and as Obama noted, it doesn't meaningfully reduce the deficit. And it arguably violates Republicans' more than two decade-long refusal to vote for tax increases. For these reasons, two potential 2016 Republican presidential contenders in the Senate, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, voted against the deal -- though Rep. Paul Ryan, the budget hawk and former vice presidential nominee, cast his vote in its favor. The deal ended up passing the House with twice as many Democratic votes as Republican ones.

* Deficit hawks: It's a Band-Aid. "Washington missed this magic moment to do something big to reduce the deficit, reform our tax code, and fix our entitlement programs," Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-founders of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, lamented. If all automatic tax hikes and spending cuts were allowed to take effect -- that is, if we went over the fiscal cliff permanently -- the deficit would be about $4.6 trillion lower in 10 years than it will be under this agreement. That's not really a realistic baseline since few were advocating such an outcome, but even if you credit the $600 billion in new revenue raised by the deal, it does awfully little to reduce the deficit in the long term. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in running down the bill's pros and cons, concluded, "Clearly, lawmakers will need to go further...to enact savings sufficient in size and scope to solve the country's debt problems."

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