Well, the House GOP has finished wasting the better part of a week on fantasy-land legislation so unrealistic and irrelevant to the final (necessarily bipartisan) resolution of this crisis, they might as well have tied a debt-ceiling increase to Frodo casting the Ring into the Fire. Obviously, the Senate immediately voted down the House’s non-starter of a ridiculous, designed-to-fail bill…. Read more »
Seriously? Seriously? We’ve wasted three whole days, with national default* on our legal obligations mere days away, for this?!? House Republicans will link passage of a balanced-budget amendment to Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) last-ditch debt-ceiling plan, which GOP lawmakers said would move the measure to passage in a high-stakes vote later on Friday. … Republican lawmakers say the Boehner framework… Read more »
As if the increasing odds of a debt-ceiling disaster weren’t bad enough, now there’s this: The U.S. economy came perilously close to flat-lining in the first quarter and grew at a meager 1.3 percent annual rate in the April-June period as consumer spending barely rose. The Commerce Department data on Friday also showed the current lull in the economy began… Read more »
Today’s debt ceiling developments, summarized in a single tweet: Standard & Poor’s downgrading US credit rating to WTF.Fri Jul 29 03:05:50 via TweetDeckpourmecoffeepourmecoffee Oh, and I also had a little (more) fun with a Drudge mockup:
The Republicans are feverishly rounding up supporters ahead of this afternoon’s dramatic Boehner-bill vote on the House floor. The Speaker is cautiously optimistic his bill will pass. (We’ll know he’s really confident if he schedules a vote before the markets close.) Oh, and there’s a Notre Dame angle: Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), a bulky former Notre Dame football player, gave… Read more »
Heh: What none of [the Boehner bill’s conservative] critics have is an alternative strategy for achieving anything nearly as fiscally or politically beneficial as Mr. Boehner’s plan. The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against… Read more »
Jon Stewart captures the national mood, taking on both Congress (Monday night) and the President (last night): The Daily Show – Armadebtdon 2011 – Nonfiction Captain AmericaGet More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook The Daily Show – Armadebtdon 2011 – Call CongressGet More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily… Read more »
Some commentators and politicians have been suggesting, based on a variety of rationales, that Social Security payments will definitely, without question, be made on time next month, even if the debt ceiling isn’t raised — and that any suggestions to the contrary by the Obama Administration is a lie. Those folks appear to be incorrect.
This brief article by James Surowiecki is a must-read. It says just about everything I’ve been trying to say about the debt ceiling situation, but more succinctly and with less rage. It also includes a useful history lesson: The truth is that the United States doesn’t need, and shouldn’t have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception… Read more »
I have one additional thought on the debt ceiling, which I meant to include in my previous post, but which probably deserves its own post, so here goes: I think politicians on both sides of the aisle — and more broadly, partisans on both ends of the ideological spectrum — are vastly underestimating the political downside risk of a failure… Read more »