Many conservatives/Republicans range from agitated to apoplectic. Liberals are crowing. The Washington Post’s uber-leftists (like the WP’s opinion pages aren’t chock full of them, has to be at least a 85-15% split) goes with this provocative headline
Because attempting to limit the insane debt increases is apparently a bad thing. Remember, the debt was $10.626 trillion on President Bush’s last day in office. The debt clock now stands at $17.325 trillion. It rose $4.899 trillion during the two terms of the Bush presidency. It’s risen almost $7 trillion during the Obama pResidency in slightly over 5 years.
Politico called it The GOP’s debt ceiling surrender. The New Republic claims the Tea Party is folding on the debt. Others went just as crazy. But what was this really about? A different Washington Post writer, Robert Costa, writes
Ahead of the midterm elections, Boehner argued that now is not the time to get drawn into weeks of dramatic headlines and fiscal battles with President Obama. “We’re not going to make ourselves the story,†he said. He spoke about the need for the party to not get mired in damaging endeavors.
Supposedly the room of Republicans were stunned. Perhaps there were a few who disagree with the tactic. But, since they are all politicians, I suspect most understood. If not, their staffs probably explained it to them. There is zero point in getting into another debt ceiling fight ahead of the mid-terms. No matter how it shakes out, Republicans will Be Blamed. We do not control the majority of the media, especially the national ones. We do not control the presidency nor the Senate. The idea is to retake the Senate this year while holding the House. Ace notes
I remarked last week or the one before that I’m personally not enraged by this. We’re getting beaten; we don’t have the cards.
There is a bit of “theater,” however, in the Republicans votes on this. As AllahPundit notes, the Republicans voting for the debt ceiling hike are either leadership, or blue-state Representatives who have to answer to blue-state constituents, or people who are, conveniently, about to retire.
And I guess I could be mad about that too, but that gets close to being angry to find some politics going on in politics.
He also notes that there are better things to fight about. Well, fighting the debt ceiling is important, but there is a time and place to do it politically. We could not win it. Pick the fights correctly. Do not do anything to ruin the chance of regaining full control of Congress.
The Lonely Conservative notes a dire prediction by the CBO regarding the debt. Unfortunately, the liberal media will not explain the danger of the skyrocketing debt, and Democrats do not care about it.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
Boehner saved the Teapublicans bacon.
CBO head Ehlmendorf also said:
“The federal budget deficit has fallen sharply during the past few years, and it is on a path to decline further this year and next year. The Congressional Budget Office(CBO) estimates that under current law, the deficit will total $514 billion in fiscal year 2014, compared with $1.4 trillion in 2009. At that level, this year’s deficit would equal 3.0 percent of the nation’s economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP)—close to the average percentage of GDP seen during the past 40 years.”
When the massive housing bubble burst in 2007-2008, triggering the Great Recession the yearly deficits shot up because we were taking in fewer dollars from taxes and certain expenses increased, i.e., unemployment payments, Medicaid, TARP and ARA. We would be better off now if we had spent MORE then to help Americans. Dems and Repos have decided to cut the deficits (but not quite as dumbly as the EU) since.
The hyperinflation and skyrocketing interest rates that budget scolds predicted have not materialized but have been just “around the corner” forever.
J has not a clue the difference between debt and deficit. It’s kinda funny really.
“We’d be better off now if we had spent more then to help Americans.” Right, because an almost trillion dollar stimulus is such a small amount. And if so, why didn’t the tax and spend party do that when they controlled congress?
We are borrowing money at historically low rates effectively at a negative interest. Let’s also not forget that the largest deficit was the budget that Bush left along with a Dow that crashed 50%
If you could borrow at a negative interest rate would you?
We are in a depression, the reason that we do not have inflation is because we are in a deflationary period due to the weakened dollar. But food and fuel are at all time highs and these are the items that hurt the average individual, despite not showing up on the Feds balance sheet. Another reason for the problems we have is the dismal participation in work numbers that are the real unemployment, that is about 15 to 20%. Now, for our liberals, thank Barney Frank for all this is he is the sole individual that gave us the great depression, that and the Democratic congress under Bush (oh, and Bush is a liberal).
Dang J, what the heck are you smoking?
Who in the hell gets to borrow money at negative interest? That would mean the person makes money off of borrowing. I just took out a home loan, that was not negative interest rate. No one gets a negative interest rate. Except thieves and pick-pockets.
So, you still want to go back to blaming GWB? in an act in his last few months in office that saw many a non-conservative act? Your attempt falls flat on us here because, 1) it’s been 5 years and 2) the largest deficit of GWB’s term was during that last few months, but 3) the largest deficit in our creation has been under BHO (or can you still not read? We know you can’t do math).
Treasury bills are paying an interest rate less than inflation. Jesus Gummie stop embarassing yourself.As long as other countries are willing to buy our debt at 0.25% interest rate I say sell them all we can
You Gummie are not the USA You Gummie do no not own the printing press that makes the money taht the world loves to buy.
You Gummie are stupid.
g1,
Actually I know exactly the difference between the cumulative national debt and yearly budget deficits. Why do you lie about everything?
John,
No, you don’t have it right at all. Even though we are paying a small amount now, the fact is that that amount will go up and the debt will have to be restructured. Then there is the fact that the government has created several trillion in money by creating this debt. The government having debt and regular people having debt is vastly different, you need to study more and be less confident in challenging others mentality.
As I said, we would have been much better off today if Congress had passed a direct $2 trillion stimulus rather than the weak tea they passed.
The tax and spend party has helped more than the cut-taxes and spend party.
Yeah, because trying to spend your way out of a recession has worked like…… never.
So, J, why didn’t the tax and spend party pass a higher “stimulus”, as I asked earlier? I love the “logic”- “it’s not working because we didn’t spend enough.” And I knew you were math challenged, but that has to be the first time I heard a human being say that just short of a trillion dollars is “weak tea”
j,
The lost demand in our economy was over $2 trillion so the too small and misdirected stimulus was weak tea.
The stimulus did work, but was too small.
For political reasons we have chosen let American citizens suffer through this recession. Now, your party is pulling the plug on unemployment payments, but at least we all made the Wall Street banksters whole.
Or the more likely scenario is that governments cannot spend their way out of recessions. It has not worked in the past and there is no reason to believe it worked this time.
The stimulus did work, but was too small.
Uh. No.
So your opinion is that unemployment benefits should last forever? There should not be an agreed upon time limit?
No one “pulled the plug” on the benefits.
That is another talking point that lacks any basis in reality.
BTW Jeffery – did you read the Constitution yet and understand the concept of “separation of powers?”
“The stimulus did work but was too small.” As said, no it didn’t. And you have no proof it would have worked better spending more taxpayers money, other than because you said so.
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Jeff,
Just look at history. Go back to the last depression and you will see that FDR really was responsible for the majority of the pain and greatly increased the length of the depression with his actions, which are much the same as what we are doing now. The rest of the world was out of the depression with in a few years, but not here. In fact, WWII did not even get the country back on track. It wasn’t until the Republicans got back into power that the economy started to change and then really picked up with the Kennedy tax cuts.