In Don Marquis’s classic satirical book, Archy and Mehitabel, Mehitabel the alley cat asks plaintively, “What have I done to deserve all these kittens?”
That seems to be the pained reaction of the Obama administration to the financial woes that led to the downgrading of America’s credit rating for the first time in history.
Advertisement
There are people who see no connection between what they have done and the consequences that follow. But Barack Obama is not likely to be one of them. He is a savvy politician who will undoubtedly be satisfied if enough voters fail to see a connection between what he has done and the consequences that followed.
To a remarkable extent, he has succeeded, with the help of his friends in the media and the Republicans’ failure to articulate their case. Polls find more people are blaming the Republicans for the country’s financial problems than are blaming the president.
Why was there a financial crisis in the first place? Because of runaway spending that sent the national debt up against the legal limit. But when all the big spending bills were being rushed through Congress, the Democrats had such an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress that nothing the Republicans could do made the slightest difference.
By the time Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, and thus became involved in negotiations over raising the national-debt ceiling, the spending which caused that crisis in the first place had already been done — and done by Democrats.
Had the Republicans gone along with President Obama’s original request for a “clean” bill — one simply raising the debt ceiling without any provisions about controlling federal spending — would that have spared the country the embarrassment of having its government bonds downgraded by Standard & Poor’s credit-rating agency?
To believe that would be to believe that it was the debt ceiling, rather than the runaway spending, that made Standard & Poor’s think that we were no longer as good a credit risk for buyers of U.S. government bonds. In other words, to believe that is to believe that a congressional blank check for continued record spending would have made Standard & Poor’s think that we were a better credit risk.
If that is true, then why is Standard & Poor’s still warning that it might have to downgrade America’s credit rating yet again? Is that because of the national-debt ceiling or because of the likelihood of continued runaway spending?
The national-debt ceiling is just one of the many false assurances that the government gives the voting public. The national-debt ceiling has never actually stopped the spending that causes the national debt to rise to the point where it is getting near that ceiling. The ceiling simply gets raised when that happens.
Just a week before the budget deal was made at the eleventh hour, it looked like the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives had scored a victory by getting the president and the congressional Democrats to give up the idea of raising the tax rates — and to cut spending instead. But now that the details are coming out, that “victory” looks very temporary, if not illusory.
The price of getting that deal has been having the Republicans agree to sit on a special bipartisan congressional committee that will either come to an agreement on spending cuts before Thanksgiving or have the budgets of both the Defense Department and Medicare cut drastically.
Since neither side can afford to be blamed for a disaster like that, this virtually guarantees that the Republicans will have to either go along with whatever new spending and taxing the Democrats demand or risk losing the 2012 election by sharing the blame for another financial disaster.
In short, the Republicans have now been maneuvered into being held responsible for the spending orgy that Democrats alone had the votes to create. Republicans have been had — and so has the country. The recent, short-lived budget deal turns out to be not even a Pyrrhic victory for the Republicans. It has the earmarks of a Pyrrhic defeat.
To imply that only Democrats are responsible for excessive government spending is fundamentally dishonest. We're to believe spending under the Bush administration was a non-issue?
Perhaps someday, somewhere, the republicans will learn that politics is a blood sport and has to be played as such. Until then, John Derbyshire's book title says it all.
What Sowell and other like-mined people can't seem to realize is that there is no budget package that can reduce our debt by 4 trillion dollars over ten years (the S&P requirement for NOT cutting our credit rating) that has no tax increase that can pass Congress.
A tax increase of 800 billion to 1.2 trillion is the cost of having any chance of getting Democrats to sign onto major entitlement cuts (OK, reductions in growth rates), which are absolutely necessary to deal with our long-run budget problems.
The Republicans haven't been tricked into taking responsibility for a spending orgy, as Swell claims They've just agreed to be forced to act responsibly.
Daniel M,
I agree with your willingness to get things done and cut the government. However, I must note that, as demonstrated by the Laffer curve, tax cuts do not decrease, but rather increase revenue. If the administration would understand this, a great deal of reform would become more possible.
Obama was taking the fall for this absurdity until the republican leadership got scared and threw him a lifeline. The 22 House members who voted against this need more company in that chamber.
"Is the Boehner legislation the best legislation possible? Of course not! You don’t get your heart’s desire when you control only one house of Congress and face a presidential veto."
"The most basic fact of life is that we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available. It is not idealism to ignore the limits of one’s power. Nor is it selling out one’s principles to recognize those limits at a given time and place, and get the best deal possible under those conditions."
What everyone here seems to see as the "Republicans throwing Obama a line", or "playing too soft", or whatever else comes to mind was simply the playing out of the fact that, if you demand only cuts (i.e., insist on no tax increases), 2.5 trillion in debt reduction is about all you can get (and 1.5 trillion of that are cuts that have yet to be worked out).
With that small a number, an S&P downgrade was assured. Not doing a bigger deal, which would have required something like a trillion in tax increases, is what brought on the downgrade.
Send a new bill to the Senate repealing ObamaCare. Nothing has been implemented as far as changes to actual care issues. All this monstrosity has affected as yet is to expose it's flaws through waivers being issued, and to add to that staggering debt.
Make the Senate defend that spending.
Make the President explain why that burdensome legislation is worth propelling America into another recession.
Rework the Ryan budget, but unlike the rewrites of the 2011 budget and the debt ceiling deal - let's move it towards the Right; let's do some real-time CUTS to some real-time spending.
Do not rely on some Super Committee to save the day. Mr. Ryan should understand that best of all as, in essence, that is how he created his budget and reaped such stellar results.
Let's not "let a good crisis go to waste"
Let's not "give the keys back to those who are responsibe for driving the car into the ditch."
Let's not agree to "ride in the back" as this economy is driven off a cliff.
Let's not be kowtowed by someone "getting in our face."
Let's not surrender our "knife" just because the Liberals claim to have brought "a gun"
Let's not forget we have been declared the "enemy" by those on the Left.
Let's not forget why we run the House.
Let's not squander the last year and a quarter of this Congress acquiescing to the ideals of those we "routed" in 2010!
Thomas Sowell rushed together an article during the debt deal idiocies *praising* the deal that he is now decrying and telling the conservatives to vote for it: External Link
He told them not to make a "futile, symbolic vote in Congress" by voting against it.
And now -- 12 days later -- he says that this was a Pyrrhic defeat?
Does anyone believe that if the Democrats had been in charge of The House they would have established a bipartisan committee to work things out? Was there a bipartisan committee involved in planning Obamacare? How about Libya? Shutting down energy exploration in the gulf? Boeing building a plant in SC?
The only time the Democrats are "bipartisan" is when they are losing or have already lost.
Bipartisanship with Democrats reminds me of profit sharing with the union. They want to share in the profits but nobody in the union has a checkbook when the plant loses money! It is always a one-way street.
Reminds me of the chivary displayed by Alexander Hamilton when he fought the duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. Hamilton fired first into the air. Burr then took careful aim and nailed his opponent. Andrew Jackson took the more realistic measure of his opponent during his gunfight with John Dickenson in 1806. Jackson knew that Dickenson was the better shot but Jackson was more determined. Dickenson fired quicker. The ball hit Jackson near his heart and remarkably Jackson remained standing long enough to dispatch Dickenson. Jackson carried the bullet in his body for the rest of his life. Moral of the story.
If you fail to recognize your adversaries ruthlessness you may come down with a bad case of dead.
Making a deal with President Obama allows the Republicans to side-step the Democrats' attempt to blame the downgrade and market turmoil on the Tea Party.
Yes, they are trying to blame the Tea Party, but it just doesn't resonate.
Had there been no deal the Tea Party would have been a plausible culprit for the late unpleasantness.
Thus, by accepting the deal, Republicans dodged a bullet...
Thomas Sowell rushed together an article during the debt deal idiocies *praising* the deal that he is now decrying and telling the conservatives to vote for it: External Link
He told them not to make a "futile, symbolic vote in Congress" by voting against it.
And now -- 12 days later -- he says that this was a Pyrrhic defeat?
I see that Sowell continues to misinform the public.
He tells us:
"Why was there a financial crisis in the first place? Because of runaway spending that sent the national debt up against the legal limit. But when all the big spending bills were being rushed through Congress, the Democrats had such an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress that nothing the Republicans could do made the slightest difference."
Now go to External Link to see where the deficit is coming from.
If you don't trust the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, fine. Try this External Link from Megan McArdle (this time on the sources of the debt, not the deficit).
If you can't trust McArdle then just go to Google and looks for your own data.
In any case, what you find is that the big drivers of our current deficit/debt (i.e., the Bush tax cuts, the Bush wars) have their origin in Republican policies or (e.g., the economic downturn) are the result of an economic disaster which is hard to blame on Bush but impossible to blame on Obama.
There are few people I know of who insist on repeating tired right-wing talking points (e.g., Obama's spending is the cause of the deficit, the Community Reinvestment Act caused the housing bubble, etc.).
None of this is to say that Obama, by agreeing to continue the wars and the tax cuts, hasn't taken on responsibility for this spending as well. And none of this is to say that the wars were bad wars. I support them both. What it IS to say is that any honest accounting of where the debt/deficit came from almost completely disagrees with Sowell's distored recount given here.
I've said it before here and I'll say it again: Sowell has mostly ceased to be a serious commentator.
Okay. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are also-rans in the compilation of American debt. They only comprise 60% of the budget.
And our current deficit, $1.6 trillion, is FOUR TIMES LARGER than the largest deficit under President Bush (2007).
Barack Obama spent more in ONE PIECE of legislation -- that was enacted with ZERO GOP votes -- than had been spent on Iraq and Afghanistan COMBINED at the time the Stimulus was signed.
NO ONE on the right blames Obama exclusively for our nation's debt crisis. That's absurd -- it took over 220 years to accumulate and he's been president for less than three years.
What is inescapable is that Obama is spending our money at an unprecedented rate -- faster than ANY of his predecessors.
And given how much money was spent under GWB and the GOP Congress, that's quite the feat to pull off.
That is reality. Ignore it at your own peril, as Dr. Sowell could well attest.
