It's almost worthless blogging about the debt ceiling crisis. No sooner does someone propose a plan than it's shot down. Your brilliant thoughts on Plan X are already obsolete.
I will say this: until last week it seemed inevitable that the Republicans would cave. After all, the President's a Democrat; he has a veto pen, and he's demanded new revenues. But this week it seems inevitable that Democrats will cave.
What changed? Until last week I assumed that the Republicans were only using the threat of a default as a bargaining chip. But now it looks like a lot of them in the House really do want a default.
This is madness.
And yet, as somebody somewhere on the internet said, If you're negotiating with somebody and you say, "If you do that you will destroy the world," and they say, "So what?" Guess who's in the stronger bargaining position?
I heard a GOP Congressman from South Carolina on the radio saying that default was no big deal because the government would continue to collect a whole lot of revenue. No. Not by a long shot.
Megan McArdle, no socialist, has composed a list of all the stuff that we can't pay for next month if we prioritize Social Security, combat pay, and Medicare--as the Tea Party would have us. It's like, everything. No salaries for federal prison guards or border patrol agents, no bullets for the troops, no disaster assistance and no FDIC insurance for your bank account. For starters.
I expect a certain amount of venality and corruption from Congressmen, but I don't expect them to be dumb as a bag of hammers. What can you do with such willed ignorance combined with a suicide bomber's negotiating mentality?
You probably cave.
I think that the best that Democrats and the progressive movement can hope for now is that the Republicans, flush with victory, will nominate an extremist like Bachmann, Perry or Palin. Obama can beat any of those three, but he'll have to abandon his post-partisan persona and run a brass knuckles campaign that makes the election all about the challenger, rather than the incumbent. That's the way Harry Reid beat Sharon Angle last year.
He can't let it be a referendum on his record because the economy will certainly be in the toilet next year--precisely because of whatever cuts he agrees to in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Boehner's plan (and Reid's is much the same) try to address our long term debt by cutting programs in the short term. All that will do is deliver the coup de grâce to this jobless, anemic recovery. Do people realize that cutting government spending means laying off government workers and ending programs that help needy people? Is that what we need right now?
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