Category Archives: The Economy & Finance

DOOM

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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 »

Shake down the debt limit from the sky

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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 »

A debt ceiling history lesson

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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 »

Debt standoff: Playing with Fiendfyre

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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 »

A debt ceiling update, and a question

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The “debate” between Democrats and the Anti-Arithmetic Right over whether or not the nation should be economically ruined now seemingly boils down to three options: 1) John Boehner’s utterly disastrous plan, which I hereby dub the Omnibus Kick-The-Can-Down-The-Road Act of 2011, to pass a short-term debt ceiling increase, then re-run this entire charade in the middle of an election year,… Read more »

#PANIC

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CNN Breaking News: House Speaker John Boehner has ended debt talks with President Barack Obama, telling fellow Republican House members in a letter that he will “begin conversations with the leaders of the Senate in an effort to find a path forward.” The president said his administration had offered “an extraordinarily fair deal” to cut expenditures and raise revenues, in… Read more »

Debt ceiling a “housekeeping matter”

Mitch Daniels, back when he was George W. Bush’s budget director, on Meet the Press, about the debt limit: We’re going to raise it, as a reasonable government must. This is really housekeeping, Tim. This has nothing to say or do with future spending. This simply reflects decisions made in the past, and it ought to be treated as the… Read more »

Final Shuttle mission launches, briefly distracts from Unemploymageddon

Overcoming concerns about weather — and a last-minute technical hitch that created a dramatic countdown hold at T-minus 31 seconds, with just minutes remaining in the launch window — the Space Shuttle Atlantis rocketed into space a few minutes ago, a picture-perfect final launch for NASA’s 30-year Shuttle program. [UPDATE: Apparently, liftoff occurred with just 58 seconds left in the… Read more »

Hell, meet handbasket

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The debt ceiling talks have collapsed. I have little to add, really, to what I’ve already said about this. The political point-scoring brinksmanship on this issue is appalling. The Republicans’ position is logically indefensible, wholly and completely. The Tea Party’s ongoing temper tantrum about the mathematically necessary expedient of raising the debt ceiling — as I’ve said before, this is… Read more »