Category: Issues of the Day

Just for a moment, let’s think the unthinkable: What if we get to August 2 and there’s still no deal to raise the debt ceiling? How big a disaster would that be?

Somewhere between massive and apocalyptic, if an actual default were to ensue. That’s why I’ve never understood, throughout this whole endless tragicomic melodrama, how President Obama could possibly let that happen. It seems to me that definitive action — unilateral, if necessary — to prevent the nation from suffering obvious, imminent, grievous harm is one of the duties any president must perform. Perhaps the most important duty.

Eugene Robinson

Or put another way:

I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensabale means, that government — that nation — of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? … I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it.

A.Lincoln 1864

Robinson again: “By any theory of the presidency, his responsibilities have to include stopping the country from hurling itself off a cliff.”

It’s complicated and most people do not understand what the debt ceiling actually is.

Robert Smith of NPR says it’s like this:

The way I put it is that Congress has already ordered the pizza. They approved the pepperoni. They called up and had someone deliver it … Now the pizza guy is knocking at the door, and asking to get paid. If you don’t raise the debt ceiling, it’s like saying we didn’t want that pizza in the first place. Maybe he’ll go away if we don’t answer.

If you’d like to understand a little bit more, read 7 mistakes journalists make when covering the debt ceiling debate (& how to avoid them), a rather painless and relatively brief explanation.

“[T]he idea that if families are tightening their belts, the government should do the same, is as deeply intuitive as it is deeply wrong.”

Paul Krugman

Caption this photo.

“The United States pays close to twice as much for its drugs, its doctors, its medical equipment as people in other wealthy countries. As a result, our per person health care costs are more than twice the average of other wealthy countries, even though they all enjoy longer life expectancies. If we paid the same amount per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries, then we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficits.”

Dean Baker

The debt ceiling dispute is not about spending more federal money.

It is rather, whether to authorize the Treasury to borrow more money to pay for expenditures already approved by Congress.

What is happening at the moment is that certain politicians are using the debt ceiling mandate to force longer-term issues; issues that cannot be won on their merits through the normal democratic process.

We all can argue whether federal expenditures should be cut, which ones, when, and by how much, and whether revenues should be raised or not. But using a non-negotiable statutory requirement as political leverage is demagoguery. Indeed, it is worse than demagoguery — it is extortion.

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(The debt ceiling was raised seven times under George W. Bush, five times under Bill Clinton, five times under George H.W. Bush, 16 times under Ronald Reagan. It has already been raised three times under Barack Obama.)

Matt Taibbi has some thoughts on American inequality. An excerpt:

For this reason, a lot of people who make that kind of money believe they are the modern middle class: house in the burbs, a car, a kid in college, a trip to Europe once a year, what’s the big deal? They’d be right, were it not for the relative comparison — for the fact that out there, in that thin little ithsmus between the Upper East Side and Beverly Hills, things are so fucked that public school teachers and garbagemen making $60k with benefits are being targeted with pitchfork-bearing mobs as paragons of greed and excess. Wealth, in places outside Manhattan, southern California, northern Virginia and a few other locales, is rapidly becoming defined as belonging to anyone who has any form of job security at all. Any kind of retirement plan, or better-than-minimum health coverage, is also increasingly looked at as an upper-class affectation.

That the Tea Party and their Republican allies in congress have so successfully made government workers with their New Deal benefits out to be the kulak class of modern America says a lot about the unique brand of two-way class blindness we have in this country. It’s not just that the rich don’t know the poor exist, and genuinely think a half a million a year is “not a lot of money,” as one “compensation consultant” told the New York Times after the crash.

It also works the other way — the poor have no idea what real rich people are like. . . .

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Kulaks were the peasants who emerged with some affluence once Russia emancipated the serfs. Under the Soviets, kulaks were considered enemies of the people. Lenin called them “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers”. They were repressed and killed under Stalin.

The struggles of the next few weeks are about what sort of party the G.O.P. is — a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation.

If the debt ceiling talks fail, independent voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

And they will be right.

David Brooks concluding a well-argued column Tuesday

“In 2009, total federal, state and local taxes in the United States were 22.6 percent of our gross domestic product, ranking 26th among the 28 OECD countries for which data are available. Only Chile (18.2 percent) and Mexico (17.5 percent) had lower taxes.”

Citizens for Tax Justice report quoted by Jared Bernstein

“No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.”

Economic Memo – NYTimes.com

The current unemployment rate is 9.

I’m at a loss to understand what, exactly, Ruth Marcus, David Brooks, and their cohorts would have Dems do. Congressional Republicans have a plan to end Medicare and replace it with a privatized voucher scheme. The proposal would not only help rewrite the social contract, it would also shift crushing costs onto the backs of seniors, freeing up money for tax breaks for the wealthy. The plan is needlessly cruel, and any serious evaluation of the GOP’s arithmetic shows that the policy is a fraud.

Which part of this description is false? None of it, but apparently, Democrats just aren’t supposed to mention any of this. One party is allowed to present this agenda, but the other party is expected to sit quietly on their hands.

Steve Benen, The Washington Monthly

Via Krugman.

“Did you know whites believe they face more racism than African-Americans do?”

Joan Walsh takes a look at the new complexities of racism in America — When whites say, “What about me?”. Interesting stuff.

I posted about this last night — Rapture Prophecy Tests Families Split on Belief, but I post it again because is seems to be going viral today.

[Also because I think I slam-dunked the title for this post.]

The most detailed account yet — and one hopes, the most accurate — of the raid in Abbottabad.

Thanks, Avelino, good tweeting.