So remember when we were all calling the ratings agencies unrepentant scumbags serving at the behest of Wall Street? Or at least I was?
Now S&P, which decided to get out ahead of the pack last week and start making demands (specifically, $4,000Bn in cuts) to maintain a triple-A rating for US Treasury Bonds, is barking on their master’s command.
But Deven Sharma, president of S&P who testified before US lawmakers last week, said the firm’s analysts were “misquoted” regarding this figure.
What a surprise.
More proof of Republican insanity, this time in the rank and file party membership:
A recent CNN/ORC International Poll reveals a growing public exasperation and demand for compromise. Sixty-four percent of respondents to a July 18-20 survey preferred a deal with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Only 34% preferred a debt reduction plan based solely on spending reductions.
According to the poll, the public is sharply divided along partisan lines; Democrats and independents are open to a number of different approaches because they think a failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause a major crisis for the country. Republicans, however, draw the line at tax increases, and a narrow majority of them oppose raising the debt ceiling under any circumstances.
So, it’s fine to pass budgets that mandate borrowing but not fine to actually borrow to pay for said budgets–default is preferable for a MAJORITY of Republicans.
There aren’t words for my disgust.
Joe_M
1983
Taibbi on the “deal”.
Commentators everywhere are killing the president for his seemingly astonishing level of ball-less-ness. Both the New York Times house editorial and the Nobel prizewinning liberal columnist Paul Krugman are insisting the president should have invoked extreme measures to counter the radicals on the other side, using emergency legal tactics to unilaterally raise the debt limit. Or, at least, he should have threatened to do this, according to Krugman:
[quote]And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options…
At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.
Is Krugman right? Probably. In a perfect world, where the president was what he is supposed to be, i.e. a representative of that majority of American voters who elected him, that is what a good president would probably have done. No matter what the situation was with the deficit, or what cuts were or were not justified, a real leader would have invoked such powers at the very least to set a precedent that the government is not to be held hostage by irresponsible lunatics bent on invoking a catastrophe for purely political reasons.[/quote]
This sounds so familiar.
Greenwald approaches it from a somewhat different angle, asserting that this is what the President wanted all along. Considering past behavior, I fear that he is correct.
Zuwadza
1984
Would Hillary Clinton have had more balls? Would she have threatened to do an end-run around congress?
jeffd
1985
Who knows. Lots of people think so, others don’t. Bill Clinton basically triangulated his way from 1994 onward. It’s also worth recalling that all of the options on the table are quite dubious in terms of effectiveness / legality / &c.
JeffL
1986
Interesting: Cspan, watching the House vote, so far:
GOP 143 Yea, 50 Nay
Dems 18 Yea, 49 Nay
Surely the Dems won’t be the ones to kill this? That would REALLY give the GOP the Royal Flush: They get all the want in the deal making, and they get to blame the Dems for being the ones to put the US in default.
JeffL
1987
Looks like about 120 Dems are waiting to see the results of the GOP vote. I assume they’ll see if there’s enough for them to get away with voting no.
Hillary Clinton has more balls, and would have done an LBJ by bringing in the opposition, explaining the dirt she had on them, and imply blackmail. And she’d have been re-elected!!!
Yup, that’s exactly the kind of unsullied courage I expect from the Dems.
JeffL
1992
Looks like Gifford just showed up on the floor to vote for the bill - standing O from everyone there, very cool.
And yes, our brave Dems waited until all of the Republicans voted to decide how to vote.
JeffL
1993
269 - 161, 5 Dems not voting
magnet
1994
And yes, our brave Dems waited until all of the Republicans voted to decide how to vote.
I don’t blame them. Half of the Dems wound up voting yes, but they wanted to make sure their vote wouldn’t enable a GOP counterpart to back down.
You know what would have been even more embarrassing than passing it?
Voting to pass it and then enough Republicans vote Nay that you have a Yea vote on the bill and it didn’t even pass.
:)
JeffL
1996
Yeah, in a way I can see that - don’t let any GOPers get a free “No” vote. It boggles my mind that any Republican could consider voting for this anything but an “In your face, your mama” slam in the face of the Dems, but we’re in bizzarro world now.
Zuwadza
1997
Failure to pay federal debts, and by extension the debt ceiling itself, is also legally dubious. Unless it goes to court we will never know. As for its effectiveness, we will never that either since Obama wasn’t even willing to use it as a bargaining chip.
So here’s a question:
If the White House and Democrats fully embraced the deficit commission proposals, would we be in a better situation where we are now?
Because a strong case can be made that this deal is to the right of Simpson-Bowles, or at least the likely result will be.
Absolutely–I’d say the case is airtight, given that Simpson-Bowles proposed more than one trillion in revenue increases.
OTH, it made systemic changes to entitlements that would have reduced benefits, and that hasn’t happened with this plan (yet).
We’ll see what happens with the Suuuuuper Committee
