At this point, I think many of the House Republicans have stopped even trying to interact with reality. Last night, the House passed the Cut, Cap and Balance measure put forward by the Tea Party types. It can’t pass the Senate, and even if it could, it couldn’t be enacted in time to prevent default on the U.S. debt. Everyone in Washington knows it can’t work. So why do it at all? It seems pretty sad if they’re doing this meaningless dance just to polish their bona fides for their next re-election campaign.
It’s not that they don’t have a point. It’s true that the country has more of a spending problem than a revenue problem. Spending cuts have to be a larger part of the deficit reduction (elimination?) than do revenue increases. The issue is that so many of the Republicans in the House are so hell-bent on cutting spending that they’re going to drag the rest of the country with them off the cliff of default. For some ridiculous reason that I have yet to understand, they believe that if the U.S. government doesn’t pay all of it’s bills, but manages to pay some of them, that we aren’t in default.
Marin Cogan of Politico.com writes of the viewpoint of one of the House GOP-ers: “There is no reason to call this thing a default, the issue is whether to have an increase in the debt ceiling,” said Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, a freshman who sometimes notes that he studied economics at Duke University. “There will not be a default of our credit unless the president decides on his own to breach our obligation to our creditors — that’s an entirely separate issue from raising the debt ceiling, but nevertheless the president has acted like not raising the debt ceiling is equivalent to a default. It is absolutely not equivalent to a default to our creditors.” (Read the article here.)
America, unlike most countries, give Congress two chances at determining what it spends. Congress decides how much to spend, and then it decides whether or not to borrow the money to pay for what it bought. (I’d like to point out that this is stupid.) Clearly, spending must be brought under control if we are to ever emerge from under this mountain of debt, but deciding all of a sudden to not borrow the money that we need to pay the current bills is absurd. Rep. Brooks thinks that if we don’t send out unemployment benefits or cut federal workers their paychecks, that somehow doesn’t count as a default. The rest of the planet, credit ratings agencies included, begs to differ.