I’ll call bullshit on that.
Realizing the fact that our economy is coughing up blood and pieces of lung tissue and saying that we need to stop spending like there is no end is plain common sense. Of course, that’s why the libs are raising so much hell about it.
The debt is a future problem. The idea that our economy is currently in the dumps because of spending is a pretty ridiculous idea. In reality, we’re trading current economic strenght, such that it is, for future costs. It makes no sense to say that we’re actually weaker currently because of that spending.
In any case, spending isn’t especially high currently in any historical sense. On the other hand, tax rates are at a historical low. In terms of being outside the historical trends and norms, the current deficit is a greater product of revenues than spending.
And this is the right solution? Threaten to send the country into default on spending that they themselves approved?
Not to mention increasing the interest on the current debt, driving up the deficit faster.
Moreover, I just don’t see a practical way to solve future debt problems. The Bush Tax Cuts are a good example of what happens when the government does seem to be on a path to solving the problem; politicians demagogue turning the surplus into a tax cut because “it’s your money”.
Future debt problems need to be solved by future Congresses, as there is just no way to tie the hands of politicians 10-20 years from now.
If you really want to “solve” this problem, pass a law today saying that (for example) spending on Medicare will be capped at X (where X is somewhat larger than the value today). Then the CBO will score future deficits and debt based on this law, and the problem magically disappears. Of course, future Congresses are free to repeal that law if the cap is threatened–which they almost certainly would because their present-day political calculations will exert far more pressure than future problems. My point is, the debt problem can only be solved when it becomes a real burden in the present time, not just some far-off bugbear based on notoriously unreliable projections.
Deciding not to pay the credit card bill, upon which you ran up all that debt buying stuff, is “plain common sense”? What happens when you do that, huh? :dubious:
There’s so much hell being raised about it because it’s so fucking stupid and it actually hurts us. Remember the last time your guys tried so hard to simply blow off some debt? All it did was hurt our credit rating, raise our interest rates, and cost us even fucking more.
The idea that you can raise revenue as well as cut spending, and in fact that’s how the debt came to be, has yet to be something they can acknowledge, of course.
So, now that we face a problem that has been created by the Republicans passing endless two-month extensions and three-month extensions and six-month extensions rather than passing a budget, the Republicans have finally come up with a long-term plan.
And by “long-term plan”, I mean “pass another three-month extension, with an unconstitutional threat to cut the Senate’s pay if they don’t pass a budget”.
The fact that they surely intend to filibuster any budget the Senate considers passing was not mentioned during the press conference.
PS: Posted the wrong link in my thread above. It should have been this article.
No, the business types will go with the side that is not going to destroy them if push comes to shove. Not at all the same thing.
Not only that, but Krauthammer laid out his strategy for the GOP **a whole day **before GOP leaders actually announced it. Check this out:
Then, a day later (1/18), the GOP announces exactly what Krauthammer suggested above. WTF? Am I the only one seeing this? Since when does Congress follow lockstep with a opinion editoralist for the Washington Post?
It almost certainly went the other way. House GOP leaders told Krauthammer what they were thinking so he could float the idea to the public before they announced it. Seems to be a pretty standard strategy for these types of things.
Well here is the problem, in essence. As I undestand it, discretionary budget programs amount to a very small slice of the Federal spending pie. By far the two biggest slices of the pie are A) defense and b) Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security which we shall call “social programs.”
Neither the Republicans nor the Dems want to cut defense, but for different reasons. Republicans have an ideological hard-on for defense spending AND they get lots of money from defense contractors, who get lots of money from defense spending. Dems do NOT have an ideological hard-on for defense spending, but they fear appearing weak on defense AND they get lots of money from defense contractors. So serious cuts in the defense budget are gonna be difficult.
Republicans have an ideological hard-on for cutting social programs, they would very much like to cut Medicaid and Medicare to the bone and steal as much of social security as they can get. (I say “steal” because it is in essence a retirement program, and has been paid for by its beneficiaries, but since politicians from both sides of the aisle have routinely looted Social Security for decades, the payments have to be made out of the general fund). But Republicans also have a problem in that a sizable part of their voting blog is dependent on the social programs and will be pretty fucking irate if they get cut (think about the Tea Partiers who want government programs cut but want government to keep its hands off their social security, medicaid and medicare). Fortunately for the Republicans, their supporters are extremely stupid but they WILL notice if their checks stop coming in or are deeply cut.
The Dems have no ideological hard-on for cutting social programs, but where else can they go to make cuts in spending if they can’t touch defense and discretionary spending is a tiny slice of the pie? Problem is, their base is entirely, unanimously in favor of social programs, not just because they benefit from them (and many do) but because they ideologically favor social programs. But where will Democratic voters go if the Dems vote to cut social programs? The Republicans?
The deficit could be greatly decreased by raising tax revenues, but neither the Democrats no Republicans want to do that, because 1) their donor class will not tolerate tax hikes and neither will the middle class, the voting class and 2) they ARE the one percent, and fully sympathize with their donor class, notwithstanding any noises they may make with their mouths to the contrary.
These are the intractable problems that are producing the Congressional stalemate. A simple solution would be one that spread the pain around: some tax hikes, some cuts to defense spending, some cuts to social spending programs. But good luck with that. Each and every cut will be met with bellows of pain.
The same business people who came up the sub-prime mortgages all bound together and rated AAA even if “some” of them weren’t so great and then passed them around like joints at a Grateful Dead concert?
House Republicans instituted a rule in 2010 requiring bills to declare the constitutional authority the bills are using. I wonder if this bill will mention the 27th Amendment?
I actually seriously doubt their proposal violates the 27th. The amendment does not mandate appropriations, it prohibits altering salary for the current congress by the current congress. Nothing in the amendment or the rest of the Constitution specifies how often or how the payment has to be delivered or specifies anything really. It also says nothing about performance incentives or anything of that nature, all it prohibits are same-Congress changes in the amount of pay. It doesn’t prohibit making the pay conditional nor does it mandate the paychecks have to clear the bank or have to be paid in the same calendar year they are earned. The bill could just be written to say if the Senate doesn’t pass a budget then their paychecks will come in the form of zero-interest debt instruments that mature in 500 years and cannot be legally sold or traded.
Republicans propose a law to vary the compensation of congressmen by suspending it unless the Senate passes a non-law, and you’re arguing that suspending pay isn’t “varying the compensation?” Give me a break.
Well, yeah. Varying compensation can mean anything. It can mean “any changes to any aspect of compensation including timing of the compensation and form of the compensation” or it could mean something much less, for example “varying the amount of compensation only.” I’ll note that the SCOTUS, does not appear to have ever ruled on a 27th Amendment case so any assertions about how it would be interpreted are based on opinion. Two Federal appeals courts have ruled on the matter, and both basically ruled in a way that actually did allow for the actual amount to be varied.
If we adhere to your strict interpretation that you can’t vary it at all in the same term, COLA increases in salary would not be possible, but a Federal appeals court has specifically said a COLA increase approved in a given term can be applied in that same term.
Of course you could bypass the compensation issue entirely. Each House of Congress has the authority to set codes of conduct and impose disciplinary actions, including fines, on their members. The House could just require as part of its bargain to raise the debt ceiling that the Senate impose a rule stating that if they do not pass a budget by April 15th every member of that body would be fined an amount equal to one year’s pay. The House could also pass a similar rule on itself. That’s not even a law, but an internal code of conduct.
But it could actually be a law, too, as the Federal legislature has the ability to impose fines for actions, and I see nothing in the Constitution that would prohibit a law that says “Any member of the United States Congress, having membership in said body in either the House or in the Senate, shall be fined an amount equal to one year’s salary in their respective House of Congress if they are a member of said body on April 15th in a given year in which their respective House has not passed a bill outlining the specifics of a fiscal budget for the United States.”
Speaking of court cases, I think it is absolutely laughable that John Boehner – yes, the one and the same – brought suit in the early ninties that a law which provided automatic COLAs to Congress, a law which pre-dated the 27th Amendment, claiming that the COLA law violated the Constitution… and then, 20 years later, proposes a law to punish members of Congress for their legislative actions (or inactions as the case may be) and that Boehner would have the gall to argue that the 27th Amendment doesn’t apply to such punitive actions.
What’s even more ridiculous is that in his appeal, Boehner’s attorneys argued: “On appeal Mr. Boehner presses all his original claims and additionally argues in the alternative that if the COLA provision of the Ethics Reform Act is constitutional, then the elimination in March 1993 of the COLA scheduled to take effect on January 1, 1994 violates the intervening election requirement of the twenty-seventh amendment.”
That’s right, John Boehner argued 20 years ago that it was unconstitutional for a session of Congress to forgo a COLA. Now he’s arguing that it is constitutional to stop paying Congress if it doesn’t do what he wants it to do. I rarely get riled up about hypocrisy, but here’s a great example of it.
ETA: By the way, you might want to read Cecil’s article on the 27th Amendment, especially the part about how the Founders loved having their pay subject to strings and conditions. Oh wait, they didn’t.
The meat of the Republican proposal to pass a debt ceiling but require a formal is that basically if the Senate doesn’t go along with it then there will eventually be no more continuing resolutions and thus the government will shut down. The punishment for the Senate is just a populist move, and honestly one which will resonate with a lot of Americans. It’s an almost meaningless issue, as any form of punishment would appear to utilize a mechanism that would just allow for its reversal once a budget passed.
I don’t see how Boehner is any more hypocritical than a Senator Obama railing on the debt ceiling and complaining about debt and then overseeing a $6tn increase in Federal debt as President. (For the record I don’t think either are being all that hypocritical on these respective issues, they were different issues at different times in the country.) Your opinion on the relative hypocrisy of these acts will probably be closely associated with your partisan biases.
I noticed you carefully said “increase in federal debt” rather than “federal spending” - the reason you chose to phrase it that way is also the retort to that statement.