Debt Seething

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the ability of the government to borrow money was included in the Constitution, there weren’t political parties. Nor did the founders envision the evolution of two dominant ones, followed by the devolution of one into undemocratic nihilism; genuflecting to a pathological liar, would-be autocrat, and, now, convicted sexual abuser; a party unwilling to stop defending and mirroring him, to resume partnership in democracy. But here we are.

In the beginning, borrowing against “the full faith and credit” of the US required Congressional approval in each instance. As the country grew and expenditures increased, it became unwieldy; thus was born the “debt ceiling” concept. The idea was that Congress could spend money up to a legislated limit without going through the process of repetitive authorization. Streamlining, in other words, the ability of the government to function.

Then came World War I, for which expenses could not be predicted. Containing a not-yet insane Republican party, Congress approved the first Liberty Loan Act of 1917. Then, shortly, another; each distributed borrowing limits between government bonds and one-year certificates, but freed the treasury to issue debt more efficiently. That worked until 1939, when WWII and the Great Depression occasioned eliminating those distribution rules, simplifying future spending.

Emphasis on “future.” Just as there’s confusion between debt and deficit, the function of the debt ceiling is widely misunderstood and, by Republicans, intentionally mischaracterized. If someone owes too much on their credit card, they analogize, the solution isn’t to let them spend more. Which sounds sensible, until you realize they’re proposing reneging on what’s already owed. In their credit card metaphor, they’d destroy the owner’s credit score forever, if not longer. How is paying one’s bills and THEN addressing future spending even controversial? Shouldn’t preserving “full faith and credit” come first?

If the debtor were your child, would you force them into default to teach a lesson, or would you insist they pay their bills, responsibly? Would you prevent them from paying until they stopped volunteering at a food bank? Dropped out of school? Poisoned a reservoir? Do I analogize as badly as they? Not really.

Though it wasn’t foreseen as such, the debt limit has been a political wedge for several decades. In 2006, then-Senator Obama said he’d not vote to raise the limit without a concurrent plan to lower the deficit. Emphasis on “concurrent,” as opposed to de facto Speaker Marjorie Taylor Greene’s extortion, for which – surprise – Mitch McConnell and most Republican senators have voiced support.

As a condition for raising the debt ceiling, they demand undoing President Biden’s most important and popular accomplishments: Money for environmental protection, job creation, social programs including the Veterans Administration, and increased funding for the IRS to track down wealthy – emphasis on “wealthy” – tax cheats. Oh-so cleverly asking the impossible, they’ll blame the consequences on Biden. Even without Tucker’s braying, MAGAs will believe.

Under the Obama administration, the bipartisan Budget Control Act was established. It slowed spending until Republicans recaptured the White House and ignored the limits, increasing discretionary spending by sixteen percent. During Trump’s “presidency,” when pre-failed, top-heavy tax cuts and increased spending created fully one-third of our current national debt, they raised the ceiling three times, stringlessly. It was the first time Republicans exhibited hypocrisy. McConnell still hasn’t. (I could be wrong.)

The value of a two-party system is in hashing out differences on critical issues – like budgets – and finding acceptable middle ground, based on concern for what’s best for the most Americans, as opposed to “owning” the other side. Until the Republican party, featuring Gingrich, DeLay, Rove, Ailes, et. al., rejected cooperation, paving the path to where we are now, it worked pretty well.

So far, President Biden has refused, rightly, to bargain the credit limit; saying, rightly, that budget talks should be separate, as intended. In demanding otherwise, Republicans are amplifying their already-disproportionate, Constitutionally-granted minority power. President Biden was elected decisively, based on what he promised; which he’s doing. Holding the economy hostage, MAGA Republicans aim to undo the electoral will of the people, just as they ignore the huge majority of Americans who favor gun control and abortion rights.

Absent balanced budgets, Republicans will continue their pervicacious crisis-creation. The national debt will continue to rise, with typical rapidity under Republican administrations; less so, as usual, under Democrats. The last balanced budget was during the Clinton administration, which also marked the appearance of Gingrich’s scorched-earth approach to compromise. With today’s Republicans’ even greater intransigence, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see agreement on the sort of spending cuts and tax increases that would eliminate deficit spending. Not unless Republicans return to electing qualified, democracy-supporting leaders, assuming there remain any who fit the description.

Also, the debt ceiling may have been unconstitutional from the beginning. 

To Cut Off One's Nose...

 

There was a time when it was impossible to believe elected Republicans would deliberately damage the country and its residents for political gain. After all, how could such a thing be considered a positive? Well, it’s come to the point that it’s really the only explanation for what they’re doing. And not doing.

In Congress and in state houses around the land, Republicans are making sure Americans will continue to get sick from the pandemic, and are planning to run for reelection on it. Ban mandates. Shut the government down to make it happen. They’re saying so, openly.

As there remain millions of people refusing to be vaccinated, even as their anti-vax “influencers” make deathbed repentance and call for vaccination before dying of the virus, Republican leaders see a perfect constituency. (It’s possible followers only of rightwing media haven’t even heard of those prominent deaths.)

Latest example: having pushed to end unemployment benefits in the now-discredited belief that it’d stimulate return to employment, suddenly they’re all for extending those benefits: but only to those who quit their jobs rather than be vaccinated. “We’re here for you, anti-vax conspiracists and Qanoners. Refusers to be microchipped and magnetized. Remember us, if you’re still alive, on election day. Let’s go, Brandon.”

The logic must be that they count on their in-pocket media to make sure voters only note that, say, the pandemic is continuing, or that the economy is struggling in some areas. Memories are short and facts in short supply on the dark side. So if the pandemic rages on, or help for the economically impacted vanishes, it can only be the fault of President Biden and Democrats.

The message will resonate through the airwaves, online, and be force-fed through one-channel TVs. By next election, memories of Republican blockages and refusals, if they once noticed, will vanish like Greenland’s glaciers.

That has to be it: we can do or not do anything we want, they must think, and, like those memory-wipey thingies Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones used, our voters won’t remember a thing. We can count on Trump, if for nothing else, to keep whipping the anger; and we know Tucker, Sean, Laura, et coven, will, too.

How else to explain ongoing Republican attacks on vaccine and mask mandates? Freedom? Choice? Yeah, right. Ask John Roberts about that. No, it can’t be about standing up to tyranny. If that were a Republican virtue, Trump would have been gone with the first impeachment. By now, as numbers of Covid cases continue to rise in mainly red states and they fall here, it’s clear that seeing their constituents fall ill or die doesn’t bother them. Long as they believe they can make a case come November.

In a rational world, of course, there’d be no case. But it’s also obvious that rationality has left that party like Trump left his first two wives. After all, it’s a party in which a celebrity quack like Dr. Oz thinks he can become a US senator. From a state in which he doesn’t live!

Perhaps he’ll get laughed out of the Keystone State. But Lauren Boebert hasn’t been laughed out of Colorado, nor Marjorie Taylor-Greene out of Georgia. Gaetz. Jordon. Cawthorn. People who haven’t passed, much less offered any serious legislation. People who only slur and fan hatred for colleagues on the other side. But they get elected, and that’s the thing. In their districts and states, voters love it. As long as they slander and “stick it to the libs,” they don’t care if nothing gets done on their behalf. In the case of Ms. Boebert, that’s despite the Denver Post’s outraged editorial.

She, for those who missed it, suggested to an appreciative, cheering audience, that Rep. Ilhan Omar could be a terrorist. Said she (Omar) doesn’t represent the America in which she (Boebert) is raising her children. There’s a certain irony in that, you may notice.

And Ms. Taylor-Greene, who, committee-less, fills her time spewing hate and lies, and just got in a fight with fellow Republican but not completely insane Nancy Mace, claims she’s not the “fringe” of the Republican Party, she’s the base. It might be the only true thing she’s ever said.

As a physician and putative scientist, I’ve never been into wishful thinking. But waving a magic wand might be the only way to stop the dying of democracy. When upwards of forty-percent of Americans, suffering cluelessness-by-media, keep electing Republican representatives not on the basis of what they do but whom they hate, absent something metaphysical, the end is near.

The New Creationism

"Job creators." It's the latest fabricated, tested, packaged and presented message, pronounced and announced, sucked and plucked, read and spread by the credulous. Unquestioned by the actual media (were there any) and repeated and mistreated by the hacks of the hacker.

"In a recession, you don't tax the job-creators," said John Boehner.

Once again, R policy fits nicely on a bumper sticker, and is neither questioned nor countered effectively; partly, because the refutation won't fit on a bumper sticker, partly because no one wants to hear it, partly because the so-called media don't care. So it lingers, like a fart in an air-tight room.

How interesting it would be, were anyone to ask the speaker to explicate. How does it work, exactly, sir? You lower taxes on businesses and they hire workers? To do what? Will they hire workers to produce stuff that people aren't buying? If people are buying, will "job creators" not want to hire and make a profit because they'd have to pay taxes? If this latest form of creationism is true, wouldn't the above chart be accompanied by another that showed spectacular (or even mildly noteworthy) job growth ever since George of the jumble?

I don't have a problem with the idea that successful businesses create jobs; it's certainly true. Nor would I argue with the proposition that there's a point at which tax rates can be stifling. But where's the evidence that hiring has to do with tax rates? It's bass-ackwards, as I've said. How does Boehner intend to show that our current employment problems have anything to do with the historically low rates now in effect?

Once again, what's really at stake is who we are. What's at the center of the so-called debate is choosing between very different visions of our future. Ironically, it's the party that claims we are a Christian nation whose view is the more unchristian -- you know: camels, eyes of needles, love your neighbor. Commie shit like that.

It's more than unchristian, of course: it's unamerican, coming from the party of patriots. It's willingness to throw everyone but the very wealthy overboard to maintain indefensible tax rates. And they don't even hide it. Here's Mitch McConnell, admitting it:

WASHINGTON -- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), under siege from conservatives over his opt-out proposal for the debt ceiling debate, defended the idea in crassly political terms during an interview on Wednesday morning.

The Kentucky Republican, appearing on Laura Ingraham's program, repeatedly pointed to the political toil that congressional Republicans endured during the mid-'90s when they squared off against then-President Bill Clinton over government spending.

"[W]e knew shutting down the government in 1995 was not going to work for us. It helped Bill Clinton get reelected. I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy," McConnell said. "It didn't work in 1995. What will happen is the administration will send out to 80 million Social Security recipients and to military families and they will all start attacking members of Congress. That is not a useful place to take us. And the president will have the bully pulpit to blame Republicans for all this disruption."

The reference, of course, is to his too-clever-by-two-thirds ploy to let Obama raise the debt limit without any Rs having to vote for it. We know what's right, he says; we're just not gonna do it, because it could help Obama. Screw the country? Who cares? And what about his implication that the bad economy has nothing to do with Republican policies of the past ten years? Who'd buy that, other than the RWS™, the propagandists of Fox "news," and every teabagger in the country? Or, how about this: after their threats and refusals, after President Obama has more than compromised on every aspect of budget "negotiations," they've resorted to claiming it's Obama who's doing the hostage-taking.

Bad economics. Stupidity. Lies. Blatant partisanship over the needs of the country. No wonder the teabaggers love the Republicans.

Lazy journalists. Ineffective Democrats. Magical thinking by a deliberately dumbified public. No wonder their crap sells.

Nice Job

David Frum (are all the thoughtful conservatives named David?) writes about the impending debt crisis and Obama's handling of it. Count me among those who agree the president has blown it by refusing to accept that the current Congressional Republicans are dishonest thieves; by continuing to believe that people on the other side are as honorable as he is:

.... How in the world did the president arrive at this disastrous predicament?

You can blame his opponents if you want. Yes, the House Republicans have played politics very rough. Not since the era of the Vietnam War has a house of Congress used the threat of national bankruptcy to gain its way on a policy point.

... from the point of view of the president's supporters, the roughness of the president's opponents makes all the more inexcusable the president's mishandling of the situation.

[...]

...the president decided to assume they were bluffing, that they would never actually do anything so reckless. Waking up to the reality of the situation too late, he commenced bargaining by offering what he assumed would be an irresistible deal. Wrong again. The Republicans did resist. So Obama offered an even better deal -- which predictably only whetted the GOP appetite for still more.

Obama never publicly branded the debt ceiling as "if the Republicans force this country into bankruptcy." He issued no public call to constituencies like the financial industry to bring pressure to bear on the issue. He did not warn that he would manage any crisis in ways that Republicans would not like. ("If the Republicans in Congress deny me the authority to pay everybody, then I'm going to have to choose some priorities. I don't think it's likely that Texas-based defense contractors will find themselves at the top of my list.")

Instead, he appealed again and again to Republicans' spirit of responsibility. Good luck with that.

[...]

Through it all, Obama has played nice, again and again entreating his Republican opponents to emulate his example and play nice too. It's not what Lyndon Johnson would have done. It's not what Franklin Roosevelt would have done. I doubt it's what Hillary Clinton would have done.

Which brings me back to my starting question: Why don't the Democrats rebel? Presumably, they elected Obama to stand up for their shared principles. But he's not standing up. He's rolling over. Or being rolled.

I understand that a president has to think about the long-term good of the country (or, at least, that a thoughtful one, unlike George Bush, would.) I assume the prospect of defaulting on our debt could be too awful even to consider (not too long ago, John Boehner evidently felt the same way, until he figured he could use the idea as blackmail.) But this seems to me to be exactly the reason to have held fast.

My criticism of Barack Obama at this point is not, as the mouth-breathers still claim, that he's out to destroy America: it's that he believes in it too much; that despite all evidence to the contrary he remains convinced that the values that got us through the first two hundred and some years still exist among the leaders of the current Republican party. That the traditions of the Founding Fathers of honest debate, of compromise for the common good, will still carry the day. Sadly, he's wrong, and it should have been obvious to him for a long time. It's been obvious to everyone else.

What's at stake here, as I've said repeatedly, is the essence of America: what has it stood for, what will it stand for. Or, more to the point, it's about choosing between the immediate gratification of some, and the future survival of everyone. Tax breaks for the wealthy, or schools. Loopholes or infrastructure. It's about a fork in the road so impactful that President Obama ought to be willing to risk his presidency on it; and, much as I'd hate to see it happen, he ought to be willing -- assuming he could make people understand the reasons and who's really to blame, whose insane theories must be rejected if America is to remain America -- to let default happen rather to give away any more, to accede to further blackmail. It'd trade short-term tragedy for long-term viability. If that's not something for which it's worth taking a stand -- it's entirely true, after all -- nothing is.

The only question is whether even such a brick to the heads of average voters would get their attention. It might well take more than even that for people to see through the fog of magical thinking that's been upon us since the phony economics of Ronald Reagan, maintained and magnified by the cold-hearted collusion between the scream machine and teabaggRs and the corporations who pay for and pull their strings. But if the fog can't be lifted, if teabaggRs get their way, we're done.

The President, and Democrats, have already given away too much. It is, in other words, time for a line in the sandbox.

When Words Collide

Following up on this morning's post, here's a little gem that makes even more mystifying the teabaggRs approach to budget sanity. Threatening to hold hostage the raising of the debt ceiling, they're making demands which, were they to become law, would make their current budget which they just passed... impossible. Like everything else they do and say, it'd be funny if it weren't so unfunny:

House Republicans voted to make the Ryan budget law. But the Ryan budget includes $6 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, which means that to become law, the Ryan budget would require a substantial increase in the debt ceiling. But before the Republicans agree to increase the debt ceiling so that the budget they passed can become law, Republicans are demanding the passage of either a balanced budget amendment that would make the Ryan budget unconstitutional or a spending cap that the Ryan budget would, in certain years (and if you’re using more realistic numbers, in all years), exceed.

The point? Republicans have done a lot more thinking about how to run against spending, debt and deficits than thinking about how to handle them going forward. The specific plan they voted for blows through both their spending and debt caps, and that’s if you grant a series of assumptions it makes about health-care spending that even conservative wonks agree are “magical.”

To make it even more amusingly self-contradictory, Ryan's budget actually specifies the amount of higher debt for the next few years; higher than the current amount by a couple trillion bucks, here or there. Gee. Did Rs pass a bill without reading it? Seaspray? Seaspray?

Do I repeat myself? Sure. When will I stop? When teabaggRs start making sense.