Motus Mentis

22 Comments

1. the one eyed man says

   You can blame the Tea Party for that. The S&P statement specified entitlement spending and the Bush tax cuts as the reasons for the downgrade. Obama offered Boehner a four trillion dollar deal which raises taxes and cuts entitlements, which was blocked by his caucus.

   Why does the Tea Party hate America?

   Posted August 6, 2011 at 4:47 am | Permalink
2. chris g says

   The Tea Party didn’t exist when the debts were incurred. How can you blame them?

   Posted August 6, 2011 at 10:17 am | Permalink
3. the one eyed man says

   I don’t blame the Tea Party for the origin of the problem. Rather, I blame them for not only blocking a solution to the problem, but also for manufacturing a crisis which made things vastly worse.

   The stock market started its eight day slide when the conventional wisdom that the debt ceiling crisis was political theater, and that those provoking it would ultimately be reasonable, turned out to be false. When Michele Bachmann, leader of the Tea Party caucus, announced that she would refuse to vote for a debt ceiling increase, and would happily vote for economic calamity, investors were correct to worry. Needless to say — but ignored by the Tea Party — is the essential fact that the debt ceiling needs to be raised to pay for things which have already been appropriated. Since the perpetually aggrieved Tea Party is so enamored of simple metaphors, it would be as though a family ran up big credit card bills and then refused to pay the bank.

   If the Tea Party truly cared about the deficit, they would have gladly accepted Obama’s $4 trillion deal, which had much greater debt reduction than even the Republican plans. However, they care not a fig for the country — their only interest is to defeat Obama next year by opposing each and every thing he tries to achieve.

   However, what really incenses me — and others broadly throughout the country, as today’s Times reports — is the way in which the Tea Party used the full faith and credit of the US government as leverage to demand everything they wanted, and refused to compromise when reasonable offers were made.

   Let’s suppose that in 2006, House Democrats were so incensed by the war in Iraq that they refused to pass a military appropriations bill unless the Bush administration ended the war. Soldiers would be furloughed, bases would close, planes would come down from the sky. The country would rightly be infuriated. No matter how sincere one is in one’s beliefs, it is unconscionable to prevent essential government spending as a bargaining chip to advance a partisan agendum. It would be treason.

   Yet the Tea Party did precisely the same thing. While they like to pretend they are patriots by wearing three corner hats and putting the word Patriot in the names of their group, they are anything but. This was a train wreck everyone saw coming: while the adults in the room told the children to put away their matches, they set the house on fire anyway. Their breathtakingly irresponsible actions have caused the nation grave harm, and directly led to the S&P downgrade. Patriots? No way. They are treasonous in exactly the same way as the Democrats in the hypothetical example above.

   Posted August 6, 2011 at 10:56 am | Permalink
4. chris g says

   The numbers show more of a spending problem than a tax problem. The Tea Party thinks it is not fair to put them on equal footing as tools to combat the deficit. It’s funny when people say the Tea Party acted like terrorist and spoiled children for wanting to curb spending and not increase taxes. Maybe they negotiated like spoiled children but they acted responsibly.

   [img]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fB7hnbBfM0A/TimJsSZn7UI/AAAAAAAAFNs/Ec4ihOKptVg/s320/Obamalogic.jpg[/img]

   Posted August 6, 2011 at 12:45 pm | Permalink
5. Malcolm says

   Yes, yes, of course, Mr. Olbermann — oops, Matthews — I mean Ms. Maddow… (checking wristwatch).

   Oh, it’s you, Peter. Surprised to see you commenting on this one!

   Right, of course all the blame for our current predicament lies with Tea Party legislators who have been in office only eight months.

   Sorry. It takes two to tango, and there was plenty of intransigence all round. Do I wish the Tea Party faction had been a little less stiff-necked, and a little better able to save some ammo for the next battle? Sure. But the GOP offered lots of real plans — actual, detailed, written-down plans — that would have avoided this downgrade, while the Democrats offered nothing but vaporous speeches, capitalist bogeymen, and shifting goalposts. Who’s the “adult” — the one who takes the time and trouble to prepare detailed budgets, or the one who pisses and moans about being “left at the altar” and “eating your peas” and about nasty corporate jets and ATMS that are ruining everything? The House, — Tea party and all! — passed “Cut, Cap, and Balance”, which would have avoided both the default and the downgrade, but it was squashed in the Senate by Harry Reid without even coming to a vote.

   The main complaint S&P had was our staggering debt, and they are right. Our debt has now exceeded our GDP. We are behaving like out-of-control addicts with a walletful of credit cards. Who’s the “adult in the room” — the one who says the real problem is rising debt, or the one who says the real problem is those killjoys who want to keep us from borrowing and spending even more?

   The economist Herbert Stein said “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Prior to this deal, our debt was projected to rise from the present $14 trillion to $23 trillion by 2020. Now it’s only supposed to rise to $21 trillion. Meanwhile, we’ll have borrowed another trillion by the spring of next year. The Tea Party came to power because a very great many Americans have perceived, and rightly so, that what this country needs is the sort of “intervention” that concerned families arrange for their drug-addicted kinfolk. Sooner or later, our rising debt will stop — either catastrophically, as is most likely, or as the result of our actually coming to our senses, as the Tea Party is desperately trying to get us to do (though it’s probably already too late).

   From a political perspective, it’s easy to understand blaming and mocking the Tea Party (who generally are civil, decent, and mentally competent Americans who simply understand the need to push back against this spending juggernaut) for everything, and jeering at them as nothing more than mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers in comparison to the enlightened savants currently in control of the Senate and White House; it’s of a piece with Obama’s demand that any deal postpone any reckoning beyond the 2012 elections. Obama and his catchfarts in the media are desperate to pin the blame anywhere else they can, and the Tea Party are the perfect scapegoat.

   But all of this is mere whistling past the graveyard. Debt limit or no, downgrade or no, we are headed for a very high cliff; indeed the lip is already crumbling beneath us.

   Posted August 6, 2011 at 12:56 pm | Permalink
6. Malcolm says

   Finally, the US could in any case honor its debts simply by printing money. Inflationary, yes — but S&P isn’t an inflation watchdog.

   Posted August 6, 2011 at 1:00 pm | Permalink
7. chris g says

   Catchfart? Is that a real word?

   Posted August 6, 2011 at 1:14 pm | Permalink
8. Malcolm says

   Here and here are two suggestions for how we could perhaps save ourselves even yet.

   Posted August 6, 2011 at 1:17 pm | Permalink
9. Malcolm says

   Catchfart? Is that a real word?

   Yep.

   Posted August 6, 2011 at 1:18 pm | Permalink
10. the one eyed man says

    Well, no.

    1) As stated above, the blame for the root causes of the deficit does not lie with the Tea Party. However, the blame for the S&P downgrade lies squarely with them. The S&P statement gives three reasons for the downgrade: that “the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened;” “the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy;” and “the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short.”

    Let’s review: one faction inserted unpredictability into what has historically been the routine practice of raising the debt ceiling, refused to compromise with the other two branches of government, and blocked a $4 trillion debt reduction package. Which faction do you suppose that would be?

    2) The GOP never offered a real plan. They proposed Cut, Cap, and Balance without saying what they would cut or cap. They passed a Balanced Budget amendment without saying how they would balance the budget. Let’s say either one of these misbegotten bills was enacted. What bills would the government stop paying? Social Security? Veterans’ benefits? Shut down the FBI? Close our embassies? We don’t know. Without specifics, it’s like enacting laws requiring sunny days or drives that land 250 yards down the fairway. This isn’t governance: it’s theater.

    3) There is no dispute that our debt is too large. Tell me something I don’t know. The issue is what to do about it. The right wing insistence that it be reduced entirely by spending cuts is as unworkable as if the left wing had insisted that it be reduced entirely by tax increases. One side was willing to compromise to the point of capitulation. The other side would not budge an inch. The only realistic solution would be a balanced approach, which was blocked by the Tea Party. Get ready for the Grover Norquist recession.

    4) Printing money solves nothing.

    5) You may delete the gratuitous references to Olbermann, Maddow, and Matthews. Whether my views are consonant with them or not is irrelevant. What is important is whether these views are correct or incorrect, not who shares them. I don’t fault you for parroting what is in NRO and Gates of Vienna.

    6) You have entirely avoided the main issue, which is the Tea Party’s legislative hostage taking. Would the Democrats have been treasonous if they refused to pass a military appropriations bill to end the occupation of Iraq? If not, why not? If so, how would that action differ from the Tea Party’s acts over the past few weeks?

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 1:33 pm | Permalink
11. chris g says

    The S&P downgrade is irrelevant, symbolic at best. If the S&P were smart (they’re not, and only suckers and fools rely on their ratings), then they might say the outlook for the U.S. improved because some politicians actually had the balls to talk about entitlement cuts.

    Further, to compare a symbolic credit rating by a bunch of catchfarts (who rated mortgage backed securities as AAA in 2007) with soldiers in the field getting shot at by real bullets, isn’t fair. Just like saying this current debacle is about taxes when it is really about spending. Numbers don’t lie… taxes went down 2-3% but spending went up 10+%. Why should taxes “equally” fix a current spending problem caused by too much spending in the past.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 2:01 pm | Permalink
12. Malcolm says

    The GOP at least put actual legislation on the table. Democrats offered nothing but airy speeches. If the GOP legislation was mere “theater”, then what Mr. Obama has been doing is theater upon stilts.

    You are quite right that the Tea Party inserted “unpredictability” into what has shamefully become the “routine practice” of raising the debt ceiling. (My God, it was high time somebody did.) It’s exactly what they were sent to Washington to do, by an electorate who fear, correctly, that we are driving our formerly great nation over a cliff.

    The Dems are also in no position to criticize a style of legislation that leaves placeholders to be filled in later. The most scandalous example of all is Obamacare; why, just this week, operating under the aegis of such a placeholder in that egregious bill, an unelected appointee issued a fiat declaring a laundry-list of reproductive services that insurance companies must now cover “free of charge”. That monstrosity is the gift that keeps on giving. Hopefully it’ll give us a new President next year.

    You are wrong to say printing money solves nothing; it allows the US to pay debts in US dollars, which is what the US contracted to do when it assumed the debt.

    I mentioned the Maddow, Olbermann, etc. talking-points because I believe these are part of a conscious strategy on the Democratic side to deflect blame from the current administration in order to shore up his re-election prospects. In your case that may have been an overreach, as it appears that you actually believe these things, and so I apologize.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 2:21 pm | Permalink
13. the one eyed man says

    Obama offered Boehner a $4 trillion deficit plan, which was shot down by the Tea Party. In case you need to be reminded:

    http://ca.topmodel.yahoo.com/s/capress/110709/business/us_debt_showdown

    I don’t think the Tea Party “was sent to Washington” to provoke a default of the US government. Nor is it “high time” to cease the routine practice of increasing the debt ceiling. If you want to control spending, you do it through the appropriations process, not after the spending has been authorized and it’s time to pay the bills.

    If you think that printing money is what we should be doing, you might want to study up on the Weimar Republic.

    I am quite sure that Maddow, Olbermann, and Matthews are sincere in their beliefs. Neither I nor you have any reason to question their sincerity, nor to posit a “conscious strategy” which does not exist.

    If you want to continue to avoid the obvious comparison between the Tea Party and our hypothetical treasonous Democrats, I can certainly understand why.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 2:57 pm | Permalink
14. Malcolm says

    Obama offered Boehner a $4 trillion deficit plan, which was shot down by the Tea Party.

    What “plan”? How about a link to the “plan”? It was never anything more than vague talk.

    If you want to control spending, you do it through the appropriations process, not after the spending has been authorized and it’s time to pay the bills.

    I generally agree, but appropriations are spread out all over the place, and the debt ceiling is the single choke-point through which it all must pass. If you need to take hold somewhere to focus attention on the problem, it’s a reasonable place.

    Anyway, if debt-ceiling increases are just supposed to be rubbber-stamped every time they come up, why have a debt ceiling at all? It’s ridiculous.

    Obviously I don’t think that we should just print money to pay our debts. We should learn to live within our means in the first place — as President Obama himself said just the other day, out of one side of his mouth.

    As for a “conscious strategy”, I don’t doubt for one second that the Obama political team is doing everything they can to play this debacle against the Tea Party in the hope of improving The One’s re-election prospects; they’d be fools not to. If you doubt that yourself, you don’t know the first thing about politics.

    As for your hypothetical: if someone acts deliberately to harm the United States for the sake of harming the United States, or helping its enemies, that’s treason. As a purely political strategy, partisan legislators routinely use whatever leverage they can find to pass legislation they want to see passed. Often it’s just the usual pork-barrel stuff. In this case the Tea Party was making a principled stand that the most clamant existential threat of all was our long-term debt. They took this stand because they love America, not because they hate it. Again, it’s the same mindset that goes into making an “intervention” for a loved one; such things are often agonizing in the short term, but are the only hope of survival in the long run.

    You can disagree with the Tea Party’s views, and even with their tactics, but what they want is to save America from itself. They are most certainly not traitors.

    As for “hostage-taking”: as I said, both sides resisted adamantly at various times during this process, and blocked deals that would have ended the crisis.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 3:21 pm | Permalink
15. the one eyed man says

    The contours of Obama’s proposal were widely reported: a phased in delay of the eligibility age for Social Security, a change in the inflation adjuster, reductions in Medicare and Medicaid, and a 3:1 ratio of cuts to tax increases. This would have been a transformational moment, but it was rejected by the Tea Party because of their insistence on no taxes, ever, for any reason. (As much as I detest Grover Norquist’s politics and methods, I will concede that he was pretty funny when Steven Colbert asked him if he would raise taxes to save grandmothers from angry fire ants. Said Norquist: “we will always have our photos and memories to console us.”)

    As for writing a document and putting it on the Internet: absent any commitment from the other side to raise taxes, why should he? For all of their talk about balancing the budget, the Republicans never put a plan on the table specifying what cuts they would make to achieve this. For example, we all know that reducing Social Security payments over time is an integral part of any meaningful deficit reduction, but to do so invites intense opposition. Why should Obama be the only one to expose himself to this? He knows that the cuts would be anathema to his base, but he was willing to govern from the center in the recognition that the best deal is probably the deal which nobody likes. The only way such a deal would work would be if both sides agreed to hold hands and jump. For all of the talk we hear from the Tea Party of their fervency to reduce the budget deficit, they had a golden opportunity in front of them, and they blew it.

    Legislation requiring debt ceiling increases is ridiculous.

    Of course the Obama administration should do everything they can to point out how the Tea Party is unfit to govern. However, that is not what you said. You posited a direct line from the White House to cable news anchors, with the insinuation that they are fed daily talking points to further Democratic goals. While you have offered no evidence that such a line exists, it nonetheless is completely unnecessary, as the fecklessness of the Tea Party is evident for all to see.

    You distort my hypothetical. Had the Democrats in Congress refused to pass military appropriations bills — or even just the ones which funded Iraq — they would not have done so not to “deliberately … harm the United States for the sake of harming the United States,” Rather, they would have been “making a principled stand that the most clamant existential threat of all” was our continued occupation of Iraq. Those who opposed the war did so with the same passionate intensity as those who seek to pass fatuous balanced budget amendments, and they had the saving grace of being right, as even you now admit. The question is whether a faction has the right to put its boot on the throat of the American body politic to force its agenda on the other houses of government. The answer is no.

    Finally, as noted in an earlier thread, had the Democrats completely capitulated, the Republicans would probably have agreed to pay for the bills which they had already incurred. Instead, they gave up 85% or more of what they wanted, while the other side would not budge. There is simply no equivalency between the two.

    I think the tragedy of the Obama administration is that he continually tries to govern from the center, when there is no center any more. It is folly for him to continue to assume that unreasonable people will act reasonably. In hindsight, he should probably have insisted on a clean increase to the debt ceiling, and invoked the Fourteenth Amendment if the Republicans threw the country into default. When one side brings knives and switchblades to the fight, there is no reason to abide by Marquess of Queensbury rules.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 5:01 pm | Permalink
16. Malcolm says

    Well, I’m not sure what “even I now admit” in your mind, but I think I’ve made the case that it is unfair to accuse the Tea Party of treason, a horrible charge.

    I think at this point we have given readers an ample demonstration, in microcosm, of the very different lenses through which Left and Right see our national affairs, and why consensus is so hard to reach. We can’t even agree on what happened, let alone what the nation ought to be doing. When it comes down to talk of “boots on necks” and knife-fights, then we have passed the bounds of civil discourse.

    I will agree with you that the spectacle of Obama trying to “govern from the center” is foolish; it’s like watching a porpoise trying to walk.

    Rather than expend another 10,000 words here, I’ll leave it to the readers to render their own verdicts on where to put the blame; God knows there’s plenty to go around. I think we’ve both said what we wanted to say.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 5:19 pm | Permalink
17. the one eyed man says

    Fair enough. Personally, I think you’ve got a losing position: you’re down a rook and the pawns are advancing. Hence, I will leave it to others to bring about your enlightenment and the repentance which goes along with it.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 5:29 pm | Permalink
18. Malcolm says

    I don’t think anyone is in a good position here. Whatever greatness this nation once had is in the rear-view mirror, unless some well-nigh impossible changes come to pass very, very, soon.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 5:39 pm | Permalink
19. the one eyed man says

    We agree on that.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 5:40 pm | Permalink
20. the one eyed man says

    The thought occured to me that now that the debt ceiling has been raised, the notes which the Treasury sells in the second half of the Obama administration should be called Barry Bonds.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 6:19 pm | Permalink
21. Malcolm says

    Sour notes, more like.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 6:35 pm | Permalink
22. the one eyed man says

    Better than Tea Bills.

    Posted August 6, 2011 at 6:42 pm | Permalink