The Republicans plan to hold the Biden Administration hostage over the national debt. They tried this once before -- in 2011. This time around, Paul Krugman writes, things are different:
The G.O.P., perhaps remembering the political backlash after Donald Trump tried to dismantle Obamacare, has since become much more cautious. McCarthy has already declared that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table”; if his party ever gets around to making specific proposals, it will find out that Medicaid, which covers even more Americans than Medicare, is also extremely popular, even among Republicans.
Nor is political caution the only reason Republican leaders have become reluctant to attack the safety net. The G.O.P. base has also lost interest in spending cuts, turning its attention to culture wars. As my colleague Nate Cohn recently noted, in early 2021 far more Republicans reported having heard about a decision to stop publishing some of the Dr. Seuss books than about President Biden’s $1.9 trillion spending bill.
Inevitably, some Republicans are trying to make the budget a culture-war issue, claiming that large sums can be saved by eliminating “woke” spending. But what spending are they talking about?
So how much "woke" spending is there?
I’ve been trying to find specific examples of federal outlays that conservatives consider woke, bearing in mind that right-wing think tanks and politicians have a strong incentive to find big-ticket items that sound outrageous. The results of my search were, well, embarrassing. For example, the spending listed in a Heritage Foundation report thundering against “woke earmarks” totaled about $19 million — less than the federal government spends every two minutes.
So the bottom line on the debt crisis is that there is no bottom line: Republicans denounce excess spending, but can’t say what spending they want to cut. Even if Democrats were inclined to give in to extortion, which they aren’t, you can’t pay off a blackmailer who won’t make specific demands.
Unfortunately, that doesn't make the problem easy to solve:
The emptiness of Republican fiscal posturing is no guarantee that we’ll avoid a debt crisis. If anything, it may make a crisis more likely. MAGA may lack policy ideas, but it’s rich in nihilism; Republicans don’t know what policies they want, but they definitely want to see Biden fail.
So far, the Biden administration’s strategy seems to be to flush Republicans out of hiding, force them to propose specific spending cuts, then watch them retreat in the face of an intense public backlash. There are also, I presume and hope, contingency plans to avoid crisis if this strategy fails.
But it’s hard not to be worried. It’s dangerous when a political party is willing to burn things down unless it gets its way; it’s even more dangerous when that party just wants to watch things burn.
Like Nero, they plan to party after they light the match.
Image: The Guardian
4 comments:
The situation in the US is more than the debt crisis. The entire country is in a crisis of devision. It is ugly what is happening in Congress with infighting, name calling, character assassination, accusation, etc,. The one thing that should be of concern to all of us is the move by R4publicans to compare Socialism with Communism and in so doing undermine medicare and social security. It seems that there is a move to align the Pol Pot commie regimes with "socialist" places like Norway, Sweden, Denmark and perhaps Canada who dare to have "social" programs like Universal Healthcare.We must all remain vigilant when it comes to the Americans in their steadfast belief that they lead the world. One can only hope that the time doesn't come when they annex British Columbia to save us from ourselves and to unite Alaska with the "Homeland" for security from Russian threat.
Unfortunately, zoombats, a large swath of the American population believes that it is their mission to save the world.
The G.O.P. base has also lost interest in spending cuts, turning its attention to culture wars. As my colleague Nate Cohn recently noted, in early 2021 far more Republicans reported having heard about a decision to stop publishing some of the Dr. Seuss books than about President Biden’s $1.9 trillion spending bill.
Panem et circenses. Distrart from important issues and away you go. I am always impressed that in the US, people pay for the games themselves. In Rome it was the politicians and later the emperors who put on the games. The education sector even trains the gladiators!
It's a paradise for con men, jrk.
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