The Fortnightly Rant for July 15, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 255, No. 21, posted on Thuesday, August 8, 2011.
Barring the sudden discovery of a huge asteroid heading straight for us or a violent explosion of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, the top news story for the past week is sure to have been the interminable negotiations over, and the appalling theatrics around, the possible raising of the federal government’s debt ceiling.*
The asteroid or the volcano could mean an end to life on Earth for all of us. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would mean an end to life for those Social Security recipients who failed to act on their God-given opportunity as Americans to become filthy rich.
The Constitution grants to the U.S. Congress the power to borrow money. For 130 years, when it wanted to issue debt — that is, borrow money by selling bonds — Congress had to vote on the matter. It was a little like holding a rent party.
By the time doughboys began boarding steamships to fight the Kaiser, though, rent parties began to be cumbersome. The Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917 replaced them with the debt ceiling, the spiritual precurser of the credit card — very handy, but only up to a point.
The Great Compromise
When representatives of the original thirteen colonies met in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution, they faced a great challenge. They had to design a legislative system that would be acceptable to states both large and small. They eventually agreed on a bicameral legislature; while each state would be representated in the House in proportion to its population, all states would be equal in the Senate. It was called the Great Compromise.
The 112th Congress elected under that system is meeting now in Washington. The Republicans among them are demanding that deep cuts must be made in the federal budget. Some parts of that budget, though, such as military spending, must be exempt from cuts. Also, many existing “tax expenditures” — exemptions and special low tax rates for certain types of income that don’t involve sweat — must also be exempt. Further, they insist, taxes must not be raised. All these dictates and prohibitions leave just one alternative: drastic spending cuts in domestic programs serving the old, the poor, and the sick.
Hardly anyone in Congress except Senator and former cab driver Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has bothered to refute the Republican contention that deep cuts in spending must be made. Democrats hardly dared suggest, until late last week, that taxes might somehow be raised. The Democratic contribution to the discussion so far has mostly been limited to making helpful suggestions about which domestic programs would be most appropriate for sacrifice on the altar of Republican dogma.
If Democrats and Republicans come to an agreement along the lines that have been discussed so far, both sides will no doubt be tempted to take credit for the Great Compromise of 2011.
Sure, that’s a compromise. And PeeWee Herman is a heavyweight boxer.
Oh, Yeah … Facts
The goal of the Great Compromise was to assure that the collective will of those quaint and simple creatures, the people themselves, would be carried out by their representatives in Congress. Apparently it failed.
The people have made it abundantly clear, in at least nineteen polls taken between January and June,† that they want the nation’s debt problem solved by levying higher taxes on people who actually have money.
That solution has one thing working for it, and a couple of things working against it. On the plus side, it would solve the problem. On the minus side, the Republicans can’t vote for higher taxes because they’re afraid of Grover Norquist, as are the Democrats.
It is particularly galling that Social Security cuts are now being offered as a solution to the deficit problem because the two things are not connected in any way. The origins of the deficit problem were the two unfunded wars and the massive tax cuts authored by the Republicans’ own most recent President. Those catastrophes were then compounded by the 2008 crash — the inevitable result of Republicans getting what they had always hoped for, an unregulated financial market.
Now, standing in the smoldering wreckage that they themselves created, Republicans point their finger at a few poor saps who borrowed money from that GOP subsidiary, the Acme Exploding Loan Mortgage company. “It’s their fault!,” they cry, “Those idiots should have known better than to buy what we were selling!”
Thank God for the Media
Selling the public a story that crazy isn’t easy. The Republicans are fortunate to have the media standing by, ready to lend a hand as always. Even the allegedly responsible media. Monday morning, on the Diane Rehm show — distributed by those notorious Trotskyites at National Public Radio — the National Journal’s Charlie Cook said of the debt ceiling negotiations, “Both sides are being totally intransigent, in the sense that, you know, for Republicans it’s any form of, not just tax increases, but revenue increases, and for a lot of Democrats, just any meaningful cut in Social Security or Medicare is absolutely unacceptable. And I think it’s absolutely parallel.”
Sorry, Charlie. That’s not absolutely parallel.
It’s absolutely ridiculous. To begin with, Social Security is not broke. Its $2.5 trillion trust fund is good for another 25 years, and if Congress would raise the limit on taxable income, it could go on indefinitely.
Saying “no” Social Security benefit reductions is not intransigence — it’s refusing to let the Republican Party mug Granny, snatch her purse, and hand the money over to the Chamber of Commerce.
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* This paper went to press on Thursday afternoon, July 14th. We began writing this screed on the preceding Sunday, because tracking three days’ worth of feints and dodges by the GOP’s alleged leaders, then trying to sum up all that duplicity in a few hours on Thursday morning, just wouldn’t be prudent. The only potential risk we see in the pre-emptive strategy we’re using would be if the Republicans suddenly were to begin bargaining in good faith. That’s a chance we’ll take.
† What depraved Communist compiled this statistic? Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy advisor to President Reagan and Treasury official under George Herbert [Hoover] Walker Bush.