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Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Clean Debt Ceiling Vote


1.       The Republicans in the House would like to insist on spending cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling.

2.       The Republicans in the House have a mandate from their constituents’ to rein in government spending.

Speaking in generalities if the 2 items above are true, and I believe they are, what is the proper way to characterize Boehner’s decision to give Obama a clean debt ceiling vote?

1.       It is a “cop out” to the voters that elected the Rs in the house to control spending.

2.       The Rs took such a beating from the last “shut down” over the debt ceiling that they are intimidated.

3.       Since Boehner does not have the votes to mount any meaningful opposition he is simply is being pragmatic in choosing his battles.

4.       Paul Krugman finally found the words to convince the Rs that the public debt does not matter.

1 comment:

  1. I will choose number 5.

    5. SOME Republicans in the House would like to insist on spending cuts in return for raising the debt limit. The Republicans in the House have a mandate from their constituents to rein in government spending. MOST Republicans do not want to use the previously failed and controversial strategy to try to rein in government spending.

    Maybe they decided to try to rein in government spending at the spending level rather than the debt paying level. This would make sense. Less spending = less debt, of course. So fight the spending fights when it really is about spending. Besides, in a successful bargaining attempt you must be able to withhold something that will conceivably hurt the other side if they do not get it. Not raising the debt limit would conceivably hurt the country at some point in time. Would this really hurt the Democrats just because they didn't give in to the demands of the Republicans? This makes no sense to me at all. I know that the idea of holding the country hostage has been pooh-poohed on these pages as partisan bs, but how do you see it any other way? 1. What is their threat? Won't raise the debt limit. 2. What will happen if we don't raise the debt limit? First of all, economists all over the world go absolutely ape "you know what" and there could conceivably be defaults on the country's debts. FOX News will bring people on to say that this isn't true, but logically, at some point, if all the government has to spend is the tax revenue coming in, decisions will have to be made about what to pay and what not to pay. Someone is not going to get paid. 3. What will happen if someone doesn't get paid? The country's credit rating goes down. Does this hurt the Democrats? No, it hurts the country and in all the uproar the only ones that will be blaming the Democrats will be FOX News.

    I give the Republican Party some points for this decision. It was in the best interest of the country and they did what was best for the country. No doubt some of the Republican Presidential hopefuls would have loved another 15 minutes, but they will have to wait.

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