It finally looks as though some cracks are forming in the Tea Party’s resistance to agree to raise the debt ceiling. With Mitch McConnell, the senior Republican in the Senate proposing a new plan that would de-couple the debt ceiling and the budget fight, and remarks by both John Boehner and Eric Cantor that sound almost like they agree the limit needs to be raised, the adults may be in the process of taking the wheel back from the children.
As some commentators on the subject began to suspect a while ago, a complete inability to reach a deal on the debt ceiling could easily backfire on the far right members of the GOP. While the talking heads at FOX News, along with some Republican Presidential candidates (most notably Michelle Bachman), continue to insist that the Treasury Secretary could simply pay some of the nation’s bills in the absence of a debt ceiling deal and everything will be fine, the mood is changing. It may be that the the Republicans who were so ready to take the nation’s debt hostage are now dealing with the terrible prospect of having to shoot that hostage.
Republican Senator Lindsay Graham recently remarked that his party had only themselves to blame for the predicament now facing their ranks. Senator McConnell said that if the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised, President Obama would blame the ensuing catastrophe on the Republicans to his benefit in 2012. The important thing to note in that comment is that McConnell is saying that there will be dire consequences – the opposite of what so many of the “Freshman Class” in the House of Representatives believe.
The biggest problem with many of the Tea Party members of Congress is one of ignorance. Not that the individual members are necessarily ignorance in a general sense, but that, having come to Congress with a simple mandate to cut spending, they have little knowledge, experience or grasp of the complex economics that allow the world’s largest economy to continue functioning, much less of how that economy interacts with the global one. I don’t doubt the earnestness of some of these members, but their blindness to the realities of the debt ceiling situation is reason enough to replace them next year with more sensible, worldly types.
As the meetings at the White House broke today, $1.5 trillion dollars of spending cuts, along with another $2-300 billion of possible cuts and no tax increases, looks like the most likely deal. The parties to those talks will brief their colleagues tomorrow on the particulars and try to reach consensus. Failing that, McConnell’s plan, which would have the President able to ask for three separate but smaller ceiling hikes over the next year or so, may be the fallback plan.
Even if the first of those plans is accepted, it’s worth pointing out that the up to $1.7 trillion in cuts would be spread out over 10 years. The yearly budget deficit (how much we go in the hole every single year) is, that’s right, about $1.7 trillion. With a nation debt (how much we owe as a country right now) at $14.5 trillion, we’ve got a long way to go.