Oh, Lordy-Lord!! Are we, once again, HOLDING OURSELVES HOSTAGE?
(Okay, I think I’m back. But please forgive me if it turns out my brain still wanders aimlessly in a latent COVID FOG!)
[PLEASE NOTE: You can assume that any bold emphases within a blockquote are likely mine.]
OH, NO!! NOT AGAIN!! ... This is not the first time we ever held a gun to our own freaking necks, threatening to shoot if we don’t allow ourselves to do what we want ourselves to do, apparently assuming we’re so stupid that we’ll be intimidated by our own threats! ( Source: Screenshot fromBlazing Saddles / Fair Use )
(BEFORE WE START?: To learn about our NEW PUBLISHING SCHEDULE and why we needed one, fast-forward past “OH! ONE MORE THING” at the end of the article. The short version: Maybe assuming you’ll find an issue in your mailbox every WEDNESDAY should no longer be a reasonable expectation. Thank you for your patience, assuming you still have any.)
“AFTER THE MEETING, THE WHITE HOUSE SAID MR. BIDEN REPEATED TO MR. MCCARTHY THAT HE WOULD NOT NEGOTIATE ON THE LIMIT. BUT THE PRESIDENT DID SAY HE WELCOMES A ‘SEPARATE DISCUSSION WITH CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS ABOUT HOW TO REDUCE THE DEFICIT AND CONTROL THE NATIONAL DEBT WHILE CONTINUING TO GROW THE ECONOMY,’ ACCORDING TO A WHITE HOUSE SUMMARY OF THE MEETING.”
That’s from a story in the February 1 The New York Times that reported on the meeting between President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy about whether America should keep voting in favor of purchasing things that, for no coherent reason, it will later threaten to refuse to pay for.
Why does America do that? Maybe just because it wants to piss itself off!!
(Okay, yeah, that’s not at all what they discussed, but maybe it should have been!)
Congress voting to spend money, then threatening to renege, is sort of like Sheriff Bart in that movie (played by Cleavon Little), threatening to blow the brains out of the sheriff (aka, “himself”) if the town refuses to do what he says — something that may only make sense if you’re familiar with this scene from Mel Brooks’ movie, Blazing Saddles, in which the citizens of Rock Ridge threaten to shoot their new African-American sheriff when he first arrives in town and are only dissuaded after the sheriff pulls a gun on himself and, frightened, then cries out, “Oh, Lordy-Lord!! He’s desperate!! Do what he say! Do what he say!”
That prompts one member of the mob to lower his gun and implore the crowd to “Listen to him, men!! He’s just crazy enough to do it!!”
And that seems to be the kind of reception Republicans hope to get to their threat to destroy the full faith and credit of the economy of the homeland they profess to love.
In a nutshell (which is obviously where all this stuff comes from):
The Democrats will be meeting with the Republicans to talk about how to finance the country
If the Democrats don’t give the Republicans what they ask for, the Republicans will default on our debt, destroying the economy, and maybe the whole world economy
And if that happens, according to the Republicans, it will be the Democrats’ fault.
So this is what I want to know:
HOW DOES THIS DEBT CEILING WORK?
HOW’D WE EVER GET INVOLVED IN MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE?
PEOPLE KEEP SAYING “WE’VE NEVER DEFAULTED”! REALLY?
WHY DID THE WHITE HOUSE DECIDE TO DECOUPLE THE DEBT LIMIT FROM THE SPENDING TALKS?
WHAT DO EACH SIDE WANT OUT OF THIS?
BOTTOM LINE: DOES THE CEILING REALLY EXIST?
Those are the questions I found myself looking up this week.
Okay, how is this “ceiling” thing designed to work? Here’s a short one-paragraph explanation from Wikipedia:
In the United States, the debt ceiling or debt limit is a legislative limit on the amount of national debt that can be incurred by the U.S. Treasury, thus limiting how much money the federal government may pay on the debt they already borrowed.
IN SHORT, THINK OF IT THIS WAY:
“Raising” the debt ceiling is not about okaying America to spend more money, it’s only about authorizing it to pay down its credit card bill, which only covers those things it already put on its card.
OR ANOTHER WAY TO LOOK AT IT:
Do you know what “Dine and Dash” means? That’s when (usually) kids sit down at a table in a restaurant, order a meal from the server, eat the meal, and then they “dash” away without paying for the meal!
NOTE: When a restaurant catches you stiffing them on the bill, you can end up in jail, but if you are a politician who gets caught crashing the world economy, the worst that can happen is voters may choose to not vote for you.
LET’S START WITH THIS HAVING A “DEBT CEILING” IN THE FIRST PLACE THAT APPARENTLY NEEDS TO BE RAISED FROM TIME TO TIME IF WE DON’T WANT THE WORLD ECONOMY TO COLLAPSE. HOW AND WHY DID THAT EVER COME ABOUT?
It traces back to World War I. Here’s an explanation from Ron Elving of NPR:
The debt limit — also known as the debt ceiling — is not in the Constitution nor in any of its 27 Amendments.
It's just a statute, a law, enacted as part of legislation allowing the government to issue bonds to finance U.S. participation in the First World War in 1917. It has been in place, causing headaches and prompting evasive action, ever since. ...
But when Congress wanted to issue those war bonds in 1917, there was resistance from legislators who opposed adding debt or just opposed entering the war. (At the time, many Midwesterners, German-Americans and Irish-Americans were opposed to the U.S. going to war on the side of Great Britain.)
But like it or not, the thing about debt is that it grows on you! How?
More from Elving:
The limit and the debt neared the trillion-dollar level for the first time late in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan made that a major campaign issue in 1980, but while he was in office the limit was raised more than a dozen times and reached $2.8 trillion.
In 1990, under President George H.W. Bush, the limit was set at more than $4 trillion ...
Under Bill Clinton, the limit went to about $6 trillion (1997) and
under George W. Bush to roughly $11 trillion (2008).
The last time a new limit was set under Obama it was $18 trillion (2015) and
the last time under Donald Trump it was $22 trillion (March 2019).
Thereafter, in the pandemic, Congress suspended the limit so as to spend without even minimal restraint. The debt rose to more than $27 trillion.
The current limit, set in 2021, is $31.4 trillion.
And here’s something we often hear:
A key point here is that the U.S. has never defaulted on its debt.
That is one big reason for the dollar being the world's strongest currency and for bonds issued on the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. government being the global standard of investment security.
Maybe so, but wait! Are we sure America “never defaulted”? Ever?
“Except,” said Alex J. Pollock in The Hill back in 2021 during a previous crisis, “the four times it did”:
Every time the U.S. government’s debt gets close to the debt ceiling, and people start worrying about a possible default, the Treasury Department, under either party, says the same thing: “The U.S. government has never defaulted on its debt!”
Every time, this claim is false.
THIS 1861 “DEMAND NOTE” WAS THE FIRST AMERICAN BILL TO BE CALLED A “GREENBACK” ... Issued in denominations of $5, $10 and $20 to help finance the Civil War, they were also the first paper bills issued by the U.S. government, but largely because the government over-promised on its ability to convert them into “real” money (that is, coins made of gold or silver), they stopped being issued the following year. ( Images: National Museum of American History via Wikipedia / Public Domain )
Pollock then lists examples of times we did default:
1. The default on the U.S. government’s demand notes [“greenbacks”] in early 1862, caused by the Treasury’s financial difficulties trying to pay for the Civil War.
In response, the U. S. government took to printing pure paper money ... which during the war fell to significant discounts against gold, depending particularly on the military fortunes of the Union armies.
2. The overt default by the U.S. government on its gold bonds in 1933. The United States had in clear and entirely unambiguous terms promised the bondholders to redeem these bonds in gold coin. Then it refused to do so, offering depreciated paper currency instead.
The case went ultimately to the Supreme Court, which on a 5-4 vote, upheld the sovereign power of the government to default if it chose to.
America had decided it needed to temporarily leave the gold standard during the Depression, since it was killing us! So, would you call that a default? Well, if the Supreme Court calls it one, then I guess it’s a default.
In “American Default,” his highly interesting political history of this event, Sebastian Edwards concludes that it was an “excusable default,” but clearly a default.
3. Then the U.S. government defaulted in 1968 by refusing to honor its explicit promise to redeem its silver certificate paper dollars for silver dollars.
The silver certificates stated and still state on their face in language no one could misunderstand, “This certifies that there has been deposited in the Treasury of the United States of America one silver dollar, payable to the bearer on demand.”
It would be hard to have a clearer promise than that. But when an embarrassingly large number of bearers of these certificates demanded the promised silver dollars, the U.S. government simply decided not to pay. ...
4. The fourth default was the 1971 breaking of the U.S. government’s commitment to redeem dollars held by foreign governments for gold under the Bretton Woods Agreement.
Since that commitment was the lynchpin of the entire Bretton Woods system, reneging on it was the end of the system. President Nixon announced this act as temporary: “I have directed [Treasury] Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold.”
The suspension of course became permanent, allowing the unlimited printing of dollars by the Federal Reserve today.
But other than those four, there have been other claims of technical defaults on our debt. One, reported in a 2013 article by Donald Marron in Forbes, was the 1979 default on treasury bills:
Investors in T-bills maturing April 26, 1979 were told that the U.S. Treasury could not make its payments on maturing securities to individual investors.
The Treasury was also late in redeeming T-bills which become due on May 3 and May 10, 1979. The Treasury blamed this delay on an unprecedented volume of participation by small investors, on failure of Congress to act in a timely fashion on the debt ceiling legislation in April, and on an unanticipated failure of word processing equipment used to prepare check schedules.
So if Pollock and Marron were speaking the truth — and I have yet to see any good reason to doubt them — then why do people keep insisting that we’ve “never defaulted”?
Maybe it’s because these weren’t huge defaults that shut down the whole country. I don’t know. All I can say is I was not able to find anyone online who actually does seem to know why we keep saying we never defaulted.
But I do think it needs to be said that it apparently may not matter how many times we’ve defaulted as long as people trust our ability to repay our debts, backed by the knowledge that we just keep doing it.
But I’m also thinking, just to be on the safe side, it might not be a good idea to continue putting to the test everyone’s faith in us.
OKAY, HERE’S ANOTHER QUESTION: HOW AND WHY DID WE FALL INTO THIS IDEA OF “NEVER NEGOTIATING”?
This tradition started after Obama’s experiences in the debt negotiations in 2011.
We tend to remember the Obama administration as rancorous, with virtually no cooperation between the parties, but the reality was, at least compared to the atmosphere today, Republican and Democratic leadership often shared an aim of reducing spending and the deficit, even leaving open the possibility of some cuts in Social Security and Medicare!
Ron Brownstein, CNN political analyst and a senior editor of The Atlantic wrote all about it in his magazine late last month (subtitled, “The president’s current posture on the issue has a history”):
So when [then House speaker John] Boehner and other Republicans put forward their demands to tie any debt-ceiling increase to cuts in federal spending, the Obama administration did not initially view the prospect of negotiations with horror, multiple former officials told me. Obama shared the belief that a “grand bargain” to control the long-term debt was a worthwhile goal.
For a while, the talks went smoothly.
But in late June, the effort collapsed when it hit a familiar rock: The Republicans involved refused to consider raising taxes and Democrats would not agree to spending cuts unless they did. ...
Only days before August 2, when the nation would face an unprecedented default, Obama, Biden and the congressional leaders in both parties gathered in the White House for a frantic final weekend of negotiations.
SO DO WE RAISE THE ROOF, OR BURN DOWN THE HOUSE? ... Place your bets! Both sides went out on a limb for a deal in 2011, but both came to regret it. For their part, the Dems got their way by getting the limit raised, but eventually decided that they’d never do it that way again. (Obama White House Photo by Pete Souza / CC BY 3.O US)
Even though the “grand bargain” evaporated, the two sides (with [then-Vice President Joe] Biden and [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell at the center of the negotiations) reached a complex deal over that weekend. ...
The deal linked as much as ... [a] $1.5 trillion increase in debt to the creation of a congressional “super committee” that would be guaranteed a floor vote on a plan to cut the deficit an equivalent amount.
If the committee deadlocked, automatic spending cuts in defense and non-defense discretionary spending — what became known as sequestration — would be triggered.
Though default was averted, months of these talks had led to a nearly universal recoil among the Obama team. There was no single meeting or moment when the president and his top advisers said, “Never again.” Instead, participants told me that that conclusion emerged organically. ...
That stalemate triggered the severe sequestration reductions in discretionary spending — a squeeze that left Democrats fuming over the domestic cuts and Republicans incensed about the defense reductions.
All of that was the backdrop when House Republicans returned in 2013 with a new set of demands for raising the debt ceiling, which included unraveling Obama’s greatest legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act.
This time Obama declined to talk with Republicans.
BUT THE ODD THING IS, THE DEBT CEILING ISN’T EVEN IN THE CONSTITUTION! IT’S JUST ANOTHER STATUTE, ENACTED BY CONGRESS IN 1917 TO HELP US GET THROUGH A WAR THAT IS LONG GONE!
So why not just get rid of the thing?
You’d think that’d be easy but when Joe Biden was asked about doing that back in October, he said getting rid of the threat would be “irresponsible”.
WHY?
Good question!! (Keep those questions coming!)
Not being sure what the president was thinking, I googled around and did find an explanation from CNN’s Phil Mattingly during the debt limit crisis back in 2021 :
Senior White House officials explored whether the US could unilaterally continue payments should the debt ceiling be breached in mid-October but ultimately concluded it would not be possible to avoid default and economic catastrophe, a person with direct knowledge of the matter tells CNN. ...
Among the theories explored, but dismissed as unworkable either due to legal, political or economic hang ups, was whether there were constitutional grounds to continue payments, as well as the idea of minting a trillion dollar coin, the person said.
Aha! The Trillion-dollar coin! Here’s Wikipedia’s summary of this nutty-sounding idea:
The trillion-dollar coin is a concept that emerged during the United States debt-ceiling crisis of 2011 as a proposed way to bypass any necessity for the United States Congress to raise the country's borrowing limit, through the minting of very high-value platinum coins.
Here's my version of the theory:
Gee, wouldn’t it be great if the government didn’t have to get Congress’ permission every time it needs to borrow money to pay the bills it has already run up?
For example, it only there was enough money already in the treasury to pay our bills, we wouldn’t even need to borrow!
And can’t the U.S. Treasury just print more money for itself?
(You might think so — but no, it can’t. Under law, only the Federal Reserve is allowed to have money printed and also coin metal currency.)
But wait! Isn’t there a special law that allows the Treasury Department to mint coins at any face value they choose — under the proviso that they not be made of gold or silver — for the purpose of selling to investors and collectors?
So what would be the harm of having them mint one single coin — have it made out platinum, since they’re allowed to press coins with that — and tell everyone that it’s worth a trillion dollars?
THIS IS FROM WIKIPEDIA’S ARTICLE ON THE COIN:
After reaching the headlines during the week of January 7, 2013, use of the trillion-dollar coin concept was ultimately rejected by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.
Wait! Why did they turn the idea down?
This is why, according to the Wall Street Journal at the time:
"Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit," said [then] Treasury spokesman Anthony Coley.
Well, I guess that settles that, at least for the time being.
Maybe some believers in The Big Coin wear tinfoil hats, but Paul Krugman, my favorite economist, is sort of a supporter!
Back in 2021, he admitted the coin is a wacky gimmick, but no more so than the ”debt ceiling” itself, and therefore said
... the Biden administration should mint a $1 trillion platinum coin or declare that the Constitution gives it the right to issue whatever debt is needed to fund the government — or use some other trick I haven’t thought of to ignore the looming crisis.
What else does Krugman think Biden should try?
Alternatively, Biden could simply declare that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that the validity of federal debt may not be questioned, renders the debt ceiling moot. And there may be other tricks I don’t know about.
Would any of these approaches basically mean using silly gimmicks to avoid catastrophe? Possibly yes. But given the stakes, who cares if the approach sounds silly?
Krugman’s final advice on how the Dems should counter the absurdity of the Republican shenanigans in this area back then was this:
So go ahead, Democrats, and do whatever it takes to get through this. Gimmickry in the defense of sanity — and, in an important sense, democracy — is no vice.
Let’s now zoom the Wayback-Machine way forward to the present-day crisis.
Today, Biden says no to the coin and any other of the Democratic dodges around the limit. In fact, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen already pretty much gave the thumbs-down on the coin in late January:
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen dismissed the idea of minting a $1 trillion platinum coin to keep the U.S. from defaulting on the national debt as a "gimmick" that the Federal Reserve is unlikely to go along with...
But in response to the above question of “what would be the harm?” There really could be some.
For one thing, possible inflation?
If we suddenly dump lots of value into our money supply (depending on how we do that), then we might end up with too many dollars chasing too few things that those dollars want to buy, and that’s the classic recipe for creating inflation.
For another thing along those same lines, there’s a reason nations keep their Feds (i.e., central banks) independent of government and whatever screwball politicians might come into power at any given time.
Were it otherwise, some Robert Mugabe-type could take over and keep the presses barfing out dollars, shrinking their value, like once happened in Zimbabwe:
Inflation rose from an annual rate of 32% in 1998, to an estimated high of 11,200,000% in August 2008 according to the Central Statistical Office. This represented a state of hyperinflation, and the central bank introduced a new 100 trillion dollar note.
Sounds familiar?
YEAH, BUT THAT’LL NEVER HAPPEN HERE.
BUT LET’S GO BACK TO KRUGMAN AND THE 14TH AMENDMENT IDEA. HOW WOULD THAT WORK?
Okay, but first, some backstory from the Constitution Center:
In our nation’s early years, Congress controlled the budget process. According to historical data produced by the Office of Management and Budget, the federal budget was in a state of surplus until 1850.
For the next 50 years, there was a national deficit related to costs incurred by the Civil War and Spanish-American War, and the 1890s recession.
Then, until the World War I era, the budget was mostly balanced, but debt related to the war and the addition of the national income tax as a budget source made the budgeting process more problematic.
And that, of course, was why Congress invented the debt limit.
Early this month, Cornell University Law Professor Robert Hockett, who consults for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf the debt ceiling is artificial:
It's not only artificial, but I think it's also legally invalid. ...
Back in 1917, the president was the formulator of the budget. The Congress just left that to the president. In the 1917 period, the US was beginning to mobilize for involvement in the First World War. A lot of spending was increasing and Congress wanted to remind the president that it does have a certain oversight role when it comes to budget making and so it passed that particular enactment in order to do that.
But all of that changed almost 50 years ago in 1974, when Congress passed legislation pursuant to which it now formulates the budget.
Hockett says that once Congress set up that new law in 1974, taking the control of the budget from the president and giving it to Congress — they were pissed off at Nixon for insisting he had the right to “impound” funding from programs he didn’t like — that this changed the whole game:
And so there's no need for the Congress to sort of "remind" the president that it has an oversight role anymore, because any budget is actually congressionally promulgated and duly enacted. It is law.
To reduce it to a slogan: The budget is its own debt ceiling.
In other words, because Congress itself creates the budget legislation, they are simultaneously doing away with any need for any debt limit, meaning that the president can just ignore their artificial debt limit!
If the Republicans tried to take him to court on that, I'm not sure whether they would have standing.
But if they did have standing, the court would be very quick to point out to them that the official debt ceiling is just a law that has fallen into what the lawyers would call "desuetude." It's just obsolete. It's no longer good law.
Hopefully, if it’s challenged, the Supreme Court will see it that way, along with agreeing about the Fourteenth Amendment.
But if the limit can be sidetracked so easily, why haven’t both sides dumped it by now? Hockett:
... it is my impression at least, is that a lot of politicians make hay out of it.
It gives the Republicans a chance to posture before the public like they're belt tightening and they're disciplined. And they can also convey a sense of chaos out there in the world and blame it all on Biden.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, people like Biden, benefit by it because he can lecture the Republicans about how irresponsible they are, how they're deadbeats.
OKAY, THE BOTTOM LINE: DOES THE DEBT CEILING EXIST OR NOT?
Technically? Yes, it does. But also technically, there seems to be no actual reason or even any requirement to pay any attention to it.
But I also don’t think Biden, with so much on his plate, is in any mood to test it out in the courts, and nor am I so sure this court would necessarily interpret it the same way that I would.
NOW, REMIND ME AGAIN: WHAT ARE THE TWO SIDES FIGHTING OVER?
(And sure, what the heck, go ahead and give me your obviously-biased “Democrat” version):
Taxes:
The Republicans want to cut taxes and really don’t want Democrats raising them — while the Dems want to make sure the country has enough money to do what it chooses to do, even if it means raising taxes on rich people who, because of their having benefited from our large American economy that all Americans contributed to, can best afford to pay them.
Debt:
Republicans believe in balancing budgets, just as we do at home, but also that one should never spend money one doesn’t have — while Democrats equate debt with investment and point to a history of borrowing that’s tended to end up growing the economy and helping improve life for everybody.
Government Spending:
Republicans tend to think government spending is not part of the GDP, and that it only somehow brings private spending down.
Democrats know they’re wrong about that, that any money circulating in the economy, including from government, increases the GDP, both directly and indirectly.
SIDEBAR! Want to know the equation economists use to define the economy? Most people don’t seem to know of this:
“GDP = CS + BI + GS + (EX – IM)”
... or, to translate that into human language:
“Gross Domestic Product = Consumer Spending + Business Investment + Government spending + (the difference between incoming revenues from exports and outgoing payments from imports)”
(Cool, right? For more details on GDP from Wikipedia, click here.)
Note that if you increase the size of any one term of the equation — for example, government spending — you’re also automatically increasing the gross domestic product, also known to us as “the economy”.
This is not to say that the path to prosperity is to have our government just constantly spend lots of money willy-nilly, but this does show that nor is government spending necessarily the road to ruin so many think it is, and sometimes is the opposite.
Social Programs:
Republicans argue (quietly, not wanting to offend) that it is not a legitimate function of government to “help improve life for everybody” — while Dems point out that yes, it is, if that’s what the country wants, and that helping the poor out of poverty improves the lives of everyone, even rich people.
Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid:
Republicans tend not to like America helping people who, for whatever reason, can’t quite seem to help themselves, and have, on occasion, tried to either cut some benefits and services — such as by moving eligibility to years later and later (as if hoping they fall after the recipient dies), or to eliminate public programs altogether by privatizing them into riskier but more attractive programs — in effect, taking both the “social” and the “security” out of Social Security.
Especially in election years, Republicans insist they won’t touch Social Security and Medicare, but the rest of the time, they seem to look for ways to phase them out of existence.
Democrats try to keep these public programs public and available especially to those for which they are the most useful — that is, poor seniors who need the programs to help them live out the end of their lives with minimal suffering.
Yes, Democrats agree we’ll need to do things to keep the programs solvent, but that means maintaining them at roughly the same relative value, not chipping away at them until they eventually disappear.
And by the way, regarding governments even having those programs that look out for the poor? Been on the planet a long time — and no, they’re not a modern “socialist” invention.
Here’s History.com:
Economic security has always been a major issue in an unstable, unequal world with an aging population. Societies throughout history have tackled the issue in various ways, but the disadvantaged relied mostly on charity from the wealthy or from family and friends.
In the early 17th century, England established “poor laws,” acknowledging the government’s responsibility to care for its less-fortunate citizens.
The Pilgrims brought these laws with them to the New World. ... Poorhouses or outdoor relief (where people were given monetary or other assistance to keep them out of a poorhouse) were common means of public assistance. ...
A large segment of American citizens received an early form of social security decades before President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act of 1935.
Starting in 1862, hundreds of thousands of veterans disabled in the Civil War and their widows and orphans could apply for a government pension for veterans.
In 1890, the law was amended to include any disabled Civil War veteran, regardless of how the disability occurred. In 1906, the law was amended again to include old age as a criterion.
So by the Great Depression, there was already a long history of experience behind reasons for helping Americans in need.
FINALLY:
Do you think Biden persuading all those Republicans at the State of the Union to loudly pledge to not go after Social Security and Medicare mean Republicans will now permanently give up getting rid of these programs that are popular with most Americans but the very existence of which seems to give them a rash?
I doubt it. I think this might be a case of “fight or flight”, or maybe even, “Run, run, run away; live to fight another day!”
To my thinking, their plan is to bide their time, hoping to someday coax the American people into accepting that they shouldn’t be in favor of policies that add stability to their country, its economy, and their very lives.
BUT HERE’S THE THING ...
WHY DO WE KEEP CHOOSING TO DO THIS TO OURSELVES? ... Possibly for the same reason Cleavon Little did this as the sheriff in that movie — because it’s in the script! In other words, some have suggested that maybe both sides make sure this drama continues because each needs it, if only to demonstrate to everyone what they stand for. (Source: Screenshot from Blazing Saddles / Fair Use )
NOTES ON CLOSING THE TWO DEALS:
I would think that if Biden hopes to keep the two discussions separate — that is, the one about raising the ceiling and the one about what to do about our spending and borrowing — he needs to insist they get the ceiling talk out of the way first, before even starting to talk about costs and whatnot. Otherwise, it won’t work.
But will he try to do that?
It will be interesting to watch what happens. If he doesn’t, it might mean he’s throwing them a bone, so to speak — which I think is something that sort of needs to happen.
After all, if you really want to work on all sorts of issues with those across the aisle, you need first to engage with them, and you can’t engage if the first thing you do is take away all their weapons.
But if the Republicans, on the other hand, lose that debt ceiling as a bargaining chip, what else has the same power to take its place? Probably nothing, which at first blush, sounds good for the White House, but not if the idea is to have fruitful talks.
So if both sides have no real weapons, on what basis can they meet?
Oddly enough, they might be forced into falling back on old-fashioned, boring, “good faith” negotiations, the leadership of each side realizing that if they’re ever going to get anything they want done, they’ll need to find some common ground that both sides can at least tolerate living on.
Could that happen? Maybe, but not likely.
Right now, the American people probably won’t allow their favorite elected officials the freedom to do the right thing. That might have to wait for some later date.
OH! ONE MORE THING:
I’ve come to realize that churning out at least one issue a week (usually aiming for Wednesdays) hasn’t always worded for me — and nor, presumably, for you, the reader — so I need to change the plan.
The new plan is not to publish until I feel confident I’ve come up with the best possible answers to the questions that I need answered or the puzzle I need solved. That may mean more than a week before I finish researching and writing an issue, but possibly even less than a week, although I have a hard time imagining that happening.
Thank you for being patient with me — and, once again, that’s assuming you are.
