I’d consider it a “cave” if he agrees to spending cuts without tax increases.
FreedomWorks, the PAC headed by Dick Armey, former House Majority Leader and prime mover behind the Tea Party, just sent out the following letter:
[flounder]
“This is going to be good!!”
[/flounder]
Here is a page on the FreedomWorks site which is very similar to the letter.
The debt limit *maybe *was designed to “force the conversation” as the intent (cite would be nice) but certainly not to result in unintended consequences as to blow up the US sovereign debt rating, devalue the currency, raise financing costs for the entire country and call into question fiat money.
As a Canadian, with an economy tied to raw material prices, I can see how you might be rah rah rahing for a ratings collapse to happen though. 
A note of caution: these outfits of Dick Armey’s claim to speak for a united Tea Party, but such claims should be regarded with skepticism, if not scorn. It was his outfit that announced that the Tea Party was wholly absorbed by the issues of net neutrality, and solidly backed Comcast/Verizon’s position. As if anybody loves the cable company…
The debt ceiling was put in to effect so debt could be increased in large steps instead of small steps. It was not to force this conversation but to avoid it giving political cover.
What if he has to?
Trouble playing poker with crazy people, you can’t tell when they’re bluffing because half the time they don’t know if they are or not.
Now, you have a number of figures on the tighty righty edge who say “Fuck it, let it happen, big whoop.” Retch Limbaugh, Louie Goober, others. Heard even one on the left side of the aisle say that? And maybe they don’t really want to, maybe it turns out to be a Guns of August scenario, and they just plain fuck it up. Same car over the same cliff, different intentions. Cold comfort farm.
So what if Obama decides, in his best judgment, that if he doesn’t cave, its straight to the fever swamp? With consequences from, at best, extra special ungood all the way to God Almighty What a Disaster!
If he fires all his arrows, and still can’t stop it, if he really believes that they will shoot that dog, he has to cave. We lefties know this better than most, sometimes you lose, sometimes you get the living shit kicked out of you, and all you can do is cuss and spit teeth. Then pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and toe the line.
“And, perhaps not surprisingly, a majority of Tea Party agree-ers (53 percent) said they would prefer default to compromise, while among Republicans who don’t agree with the Tea Party only 24 percent said that default was preferable to compromise.”
53%!!! That’s worse than I thought! Thank you, Mr Sunshine…
[sarcasm]Oh, just raise the debt ceiling. It’s my kids and my grandkids who’ll have to pay it off, not me! Let’s give our children the Catholic Priest treatment. It will work, right? Just get more debt, then pass it on to the next generation![/sarcasm]
I just read where all sides are using as part of their “cuts” the decreased expenditures from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
That’s horseshit. Those aren’t cuts. Those wars were ending anyways.
For one, I’m glad that the Tea Party is calling bullshit on these “spending cuts” that aren’t cuts. Tough decisions have to be made. Let’s make them.
Do you really not understand that SS is funded from pay checks? Do you know it is prohibited from drawing treasury money, so it can not add to the deficit. If it runs short, they will pay out 80 percent because they can not get funds from the government.
When a righty starts that stupid SS mantra, they demonstrate complete ignorance of the subject.
Just what do the TPers think will happen if they don’t raise the ceiling, anyway? Even if (as they apparently believe) it won’t prompt a crisis, it’ll at least be a reasonable facsimile of a crisis. And in an apparent crisis, who will benefit politically is whoever is seen to be doing something about it. Which, since Congress apparently can’t accomplish anything, will be Obama. Best case for the TPers, so far as I can see, is that Obama manages to prevent the economy from collapsing, and gets reelected in a landslide. Worst case, the economy does collapse, and Obama still gets credit for trying to prevent it, and they get a second Great Depression and still have Obama. Where’s the win?
Meanwhile, if preventing the country from going deeper into debt is so incredibly urgent, why did Congress approve the budget that would do so in the first place? They’ve already made their decision about the debt-- Why the change of heart?
How many foreseeable outcomes are there with this debt crisis? Has anyone managed to predict and catalog every scenario? Does anyone have a Probability factor on default?
It’s so cute to see lefties who think I’m a righty.
And Gonzo, you seem to think there’d be no consequences should SS start short-paying? Like that’s no big deal? And of course you ignore the elephant in the room, Medicare. Or the interest payments on the debt.
SS is part of the problem. It’s not the whole problem. You seem to be trying to pull a Marley, Mr. Strawman-introducer. Swing and a miss, son.
It’s part of a problem, just not the deficit problem.
So many questions! First, who is this original thinker, who’s point of view defies easy categorization? And also, who friggin’ cares?
Words have definitions, Sam Stone. This definition fits.
What would you prefer to call it? Is there some term we can use that won’t cause the unnecessary tears of majestic doves?
There is a bomb. It will explode not in fire and shrapnel, but in numbers, paper, and promises. No one in the world knows what the yield on this explosive is. It is a bomb nonetheless. And the House GOP has their twitchy fingers on the detonator. They are demanding concessions before they allow the bomb to be disarmed. What should we call that?
They are using terror as leverage in their negotiations, as means for their coercion. You would be right to note that there’s nothing illegal about this, reprehensible as it is. Would “legal extortion” work for you? What about “hostage negotiation”, with the world economy as the potential hostage? We have accurate words for this sort of situation, but they don’t seem to suit your tender emotional state. Unfortunately for you, definitions of words don’t change automatically based on political partisanship.
This is wrong.
It is a fabrication.
It is a falsity.
You have made up from your own vivid fantasy a scenario that matches not in the slightest the actual historical justification for the debt limit. The purpose of the debt limit was never what you claim, no matter how nice that justification might have seemed to you the moment you personally manufactured it. What’s more, you are now, for some reason, building an entire fallacious argumentative skyscraper on top of this foundation of fantasy.
Being barely more informed than gonzomax is, in case you’re not aware, not an accomplishment in which one should take any measure of pride. Not-making-shit-up does not become an arduous demand on you, just because some other people you disagree with are barely literate. Ignorance in others does not justify laziness, or carelessness, or blatant inaccuracy.
The law is ambiguous, Sam Stone. Congress has ordered Treasury to never cross by sea, nor cross by air, the path to the Forbidden Island. Then the current Congress, including the GOP House, recently ordered Treasury to go personally pick a flower that only grows on the Forbidden Island. And you say the Republicans are treating the law like it means something? Madness.
And even if the law were clear – as it plainly is not – there is nothing morally praiseworthy about a group of people who believe in a strict interpretation of the law only when they are out of power. Pure madness.
The same standards, of course, apply to the Demmies. Executive lawbreaking became, yes, noticeably less frowned upon by the American left when Obama was inaugurated. And, yes, despite the hypocrisy, the House GOP would be legally justified in stopping the lawbreaking of the executive when such lawbreaking is clear. Now is not one of those cases. What we’re dealing with now is an unprecedented negotiation. Taking the world economy hostage happens to be a rarity in American politics. Now is not the time to start bitching about “the law”, because the law is a bloody self-contradictory mess. What’s more, it’s not even important to you in this particular case.
Don’t try to deny that. You would scream like a little baby if the president invoked some of his most extreme legal remedies. No denials. “Coin seignoirage” of platinum is, according to the legal reading of some commentators, a technically legit way out of this legal logjam. A similar and slightly less extreme, but still apparently legal, method would be for Treasury to simply overdraw its account at the Fed. A bank account is merely numbers, after all. There’s no apparent legal proscription of having the numbers in this particular ledger go negative.
They can travel neither by sea, nor by air, to the Forbidden Island. But there might be a legal way to teleport. No “constitutional option” required. And oh, you will howl bloody murder if they start monetizing the debt. Even if it’s only just a little, even if the method is completely legal, you will howl. Strict adherence to the law is not your priority in this case. There will be no little message, “Kudos to the Democrats for following the law!” Never happen. An elephant wearing a leather jacket and smoking a joint is no less an elephant.
See, the debt ceiling controls whether or not we can pay for things that Congress has already agreed to fund.
If the Republicans are completely determined to shut down the government in order to get their way, they can do it the old fashioned way: by refusing to agree to a budget and/or continuing resolution. That way, they don’t torpedo the whole global economy.
Great. Fuckin’ great! How long did you think about this, John-Boy? How did it happen so that you didn’t even fucking know what it would be after the number-crunching? Off by 400 billion dollars? $400,000,000? Are you shitting me?
Seconds left, bomb ticking, you reach for the wire cutters, and at that moment, that precise moment…“Don’t cut the red wire, or don’t cut the blue wire? Hey, does anyone know, is it the red one or the blue one? Kinda important, guys, help me out here…”
Morons. Dangerous, out-of-control morons.
I really think this vote sounds the death knell for the Republican Party. If the Boehner plan goes down because the batshit wing wants default, Boehner is toast, and if he is any kind of American, he will forge a coalition with moderate Democrats as his dying gesture to do the right thing to raise the debt ceiling and avert catastrophe. The Tea Party will revolt, and the GOP is blown to flinders.