Why are we doing this? Even Republicans don't like the Republicans these days.
On [Thursday], Matthews’ guest was Bruce Bartlett, “former deputy assistant treasury secretary under the first George Bush and a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan.”[...]
BARTLETT:
”And don’t forget also that Ronald Reagan raised the capital gains tax rate to 28 percent in 1986 and now it’s only 15 percent. And of course, the wealthier you are, the more of your income comes from capital gains.
[...]
”We—the Republicans keep saying that tax cuts are the key to prosperity. Well, the 2000s is evidence that that’s not true. And also we raised taxes in 1982. They said it would be a recession. We raised taxes again in 1993. They said it would be a recession. We had booming economies in the 1980s and 1990s. I think if we went back to the taxes we had the 80s and 90s, we’d be a lot better off."
And, from Paul Craig Roberts, Reagan’s Asst. Secretary of the Treasury…
President Obama has said that he will not resort to the various powers open to him to keep the government running should Congress fail to deliver a debt ceiling increase. This is a suspicious statement, as it is not credible that a president would leave troops at war unpaid and without supplies, Social Security checks unsent and stand aside while the US dollar collapses and the credit rating of the US government is destroyed.There are national security directives and executive orders already on the books, as well as the 14th Amendment, that Obama can invoke to set aside the debt ceiling. Congress would sigh with relief that Obama had prevented the lawmakers from destroying the country.
So what might be going on?
One possibility is that the political theater is operating to bring about otherwise politically impossible cuts in the social safety net.
[...]
If Bush and Cheney were still in office, they would use the debt ceiling impasse to seize more power from Congress. Obama, however, might be so well aligned with financial interests that the opportunity he sees is to cut Social Security, Medicare and education loose from the federal budget. Then Wall Street can privatize them.
Whatever emerges from the debt ceiling impasse, it will not be in the interest of the American people.
I think that’s been pretty obvious all along.
The violations of other countries’ sovereignties, the naked aggressions that constitute war crimes, the murder of noncombatants, and the horrible moral and economic expense inflicted by the maximization of the military/security complex’s profits are somehow not a crisis.[...]
The offshoring of US jobs, GDP, tax base, and consumer demand that has eroded away the US economy and the government’s tax base, thus elevating the deficit, is somehow not a crisis.
[...]
The US has become such a ridiculous collection of fools that no real crisis can be recognized. Instead, the country is mesmerized by a fake crisis.
[...]
The debt ceiling needed to be quietly raised. Instead, the Republicans started a fire and then threw gasoline on it.
[...]
This level of irresponsibility is seldom seen even from American politicians.
[...]
While the world media fixates on the orchestrated debt ceiling crisis, the US government continues to bomb civilians in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia and continues with preparations to do the same thing to Syria and Iran.
And that may be the other shoe for Roberts’ earlier question: So what might be going on?
Americans need desperately to ask themselves why they put into political office such utterly irresponsible and incompetent people capable of creating such a totally unnecessary crisis loaded with such disastrous potential outcomes.
Are there any other kind?
If the President can declare on his own authority, without statutory basis and in defiance of the US Constitution, that he can assassinate US citizens who he considers to be a threat to national security, he certainly can declare that default is a threat to national security and that it is within his powers as commander-in-chief to ignore the debt ceiling.
Well, yes. There is that.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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