Yesterday, the federal government hit the debt limit, and the Treasury Department started instituting “extraordinary measures” — which waste taxpayers’ money — to buy a few more months for Congress to dither, grandstand and demagogue, instead of authorizing the issuance of debt that is mathematically necessary in order to spend the money that Congress has already ordered the Treasury Department… Read more »
I missed this when it came out on Saturday, but it’s a must-read: Reagan’s OMB director, David Stockman, eviscerates both the Obama and Ryan budget plans.
#PANIC!!: Federal borrowing is on pace to hit the legal limit on the national debt in less than a week. … As of the close of business Tuesday…the U.S. Treasury [had] the authority to borrow only an additional $25.635 billion before it hits the statutory debt limit. … [D]uring the first 821 days of Obama’s presidency the debt increased by… Read more »
It’s a few days old, but via Jim Kelly, I’ve just discovered David Frum’s article “Two Cheers for the Welfare State.” Frum, if you don’t know, is a former National Review editor and George W. Bush speechwriter, a one-time “true believer” in all things conservative, but who has become associated in recent years with the GOP’s centrist wing. Anyway, I… Read more »
Andrew Sullivan is finally back to blogging after a long health hiatus that stretched back to before the State of the Union address. I’ve been wondering, ever since the SOTU, whether Sullivan would share my disgust at Obama’s abject failure to pivot toward fiscal responsibility in a serious way. I expected that he would. And boy, was I ever right:… Read more »
The Wall Street Journal‘s David Wessel looks ahead to Obama’s budget, due Monday, and what it may signify about his approach to the looming debt crisis. (You may recall that I blasted Obama after his State of the Union for timidity vis a vis the debt.) Wessel writes that “when Barack Obama’s budget arrives on Monday, the thoughtful will look… Read more »
I already tweeted this, but since new tweets aren’t showing up in the sidebar right now, due to the hangover from the recent blog outage… Friday’s Planet Money podcast, about Europe’s debt woes and the potential Lehman-style mega-crisis that could be in their (and our) future, was a classic in the #PANIC!!! genre. It may be their most unnerving episode… Read more »
My tweet importer thingy, which depends on the increasingly unreliable FriendFeed, has been up and down, but I just a series of posted tweets that I wanted to reproduce here. WARNING: Rant ahead. Contains some salty language. Proceed at your own risk. The tweets were inspired by this article, in which Glenn Beck reveals himself, once again, to be a… Read more »
An Economist article that I tweeted this morning looks at how much worse the recession was than previously believed, and examines the implications:
File away Peggy Noonan’s latest column, “America Is at Risk of Boiling Over,” into the Grand Unified Theory of PANIC!!!! file. Money quote: The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped… Read more »