Coop Scoop: The Great Debt Ceiling Show is Only That... a Cynical Show.
Default was never gonna happen. And both parties are lying.
June 1, 2023
By Marc Cooper
As it is the end of the month I finished raising my own debt ceiling last night so now I can concentrate on the one in Washington. But first, a few words about my own process.
As I am a greedy bastard I put almost all purchases and charges on my Amex card so I can reap the points and get out of Dodge now and then. So I sat down this afternoon, as I do quite regularly during the year, to pay off the pending debt. It’s just not that much fun to write out $5000 checks to American Express every month.
For a few moments this month I considered following Kevin McCarthy’s approach and I thought about trying to negotiate it with American Express. I thought I could make them a deal…like I will pay what I owe you if YOU stop spending so much on your TV advertising. Nah. That wouldn’t work. I considered also telling them that I would pay what I owe if they would concede giving me 10X the points I actually acquired. Nah.
I just grimaced and wrote the damn check as I do every month as I do not have the luxuries that the US Congress apparently it thinks it might have with those folks to whom it owes more …several billions more than my five grand.
Well, the above was a poor attempt at humor. And as poor as it is, and it is very poor, it is still a lot more fun than thinking about the skip loader of pure unadulterated bullshit that has been dumped on us by our own dysfunctional political class and a media that matches it. The entire Debt Limit Crisis is and was phony and it reveals three great failures in our society.
Our political class is composed primarily of clowns, thieves, liars, cynics, psychopaths and here and there a few decent folks who really want to serve society. That latter species is endangered to say the least. Both political parties have lied to their own constituents about the deal. The media has lied to everybody. And The People seem completely ignorant about how their own government works as a result.
There was never ever going to be a default no matter how much heavy breathing on television and in the news in general. In the House, the Democrats only needed to peel off five Republicans to pass whatever and however Biden wanted it. Ditto with the Republicans. They only needed 5 Democratic votes to pass their horror of a proposal. In the end, neither formula was used as neither was necessary.
I predicted this hours before the vote when I wrote Tuesday night: “You can be sure that the vote to raise the debt limit will come from about half the Republicans in the House (about 100-125 votes) and about 150 Democrats will also vote to approve the debt deal. This was always going to be the case and there was never even the most remote chance of a default.”
Hey, I came damn close now that we can see the vote. In rough terms, about 2/3 of each party voted for the debt raise, and about 1/3 of each opposed.
What there was in the “run-up” was a lot of political jockeying, lying, distorting, and hostage taking so that the parties could extract the maximum benefit from a manufactured non-crisis.
The Republicans are lying (and not very effectively) to their crazed base of nutballs, claiming they have won important concessions from the Democrats. That’s a bold lie. They have crow barred a few very minor cuts that are a million miles away from the feverish proposal to slash and burn that the Republicans all endorsed last week. No wonder we are now seeing a spreading revolt inside the GOP led by the Taliban Twenty, the beating and fascist adjacent heart of the ill-named Freedom Caucus. These miscreants really would let the US default but they are still a minority in the party. Numbers wise: The ridiculous bill passed last week by only House Republicans (and therefore DOA) would have cut about $5 trillion in spending over the next decade. This deal, it seems, trims spending over the decade by about $1 trillion (sort of an eyedropper in the bucket of overall government spending).
The Democrats are also fibbing. America doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, they say. Well, we might fund some now and then. And we have supported others. But we supposedly don’t make deals with them. Yet, after claiming there would be no negotiating the obligatory debt ceiling raise, Biden invited domestic terrorist Kevin McCarthy into the Oval Office to…negotiate! I’m not being loose with my language nor hyper-partisan. The Debt Ceiling vote has zip to do with the budget, has nothing to do with plotting out spending for next year, and is automatically passed…when a Republican is in the White House. No need to belabor it because you already know the details unless you accidentally swallowed a bottle of Percocet this week.
McCarthy held a gun to the head of the president, and to the nation as a whole, and for that matter to the global economy, promising he would blow it all up if he didn’t get the Dems to agree to cut spending (though something like 1/3 of the historic national debt was run up only in the 4 years of the Trump era). Now, Biden and the Democrats knew very well that McCarthy was probably bluffing. Probably, I say because this generation of Republicans might crazy enough to pull the trigger. Very doubtful but could Biden be sure?
I understand why Biden relented but I would argue he was wrong. McCarthy’s gun was loaded with nothing more than extremely stupid rhetoric. Joe Biden should have worked up his best Logan Roy impersonation, slowly removing his Ray-Bans, and calmly but firmly telling McCarthy to “Fuck Off!” Go ahead and let the Republicans bring the country to the brink of ruin. They deserve the credit. Bring it!
But, no. Biden made the deal. And while the cuts Biden agreed to are rather minor, they are not minor to the thousands who will feel the blade..mostly older people on food stamps ( a political class with very little to zero leverage, importance or even recognition of existence).
We are all going to sleep better at night now knowing that Biden has agreed to INCREASE the work mandate for older people on food stamps and general welfare. That’s right, thanks to this deal, single male food stamp recipients who before did not have to work after age 49, now have to work till age 55. Wow! What a great windfall for the American economy! Let’s get them lazy, greedy, geezers back into the Walmart uniforms before it’s too late. There are some other ringers as well. Like green lighting some major pipeline and drilling projects opposed by reasonable humans who live nearby (but pushed by none other than drilling magnate and part-time Senator Joe Manchin).
It’s NOT a great deal by Democratic standards. First of all because it is a “deal” when the vote should just be an obligation. And credit for Biden in getting the Repubs to make this a two year pact. The deal also takes off the table a possible Republican-led shutdown of the government projected for September.
Yet, I argue, there should be NO vote on this “debt ceiling” and if the Democrats ever again gain a governing majority it wold be a great idea to just eliminate this yearly, empty farce which they have failed to do to date when they have had that power.
And secondly, it sets a very bad precedent. Perhaps worse, Biden failed to force the Republicans to cede one penny in new taxes on the wealthy. That’s what he said the trade-off would be but it did not happen. So it’s a deal that allows Elon Musk and Donald Trump to continue to be IRS deadbeats while forcing 54 yr old single men to get a job to keep their lousy $8 a day in food stamps (though I assume that nobody quit their job to make $1 an hour in food stamps). If you are on food stamps it means you are already in a jam. You lost your job/s. Or you are too sick, too weak, too screwed up mentally to be employed…so who really cares if you can eat anyway?
Democrats are trying to put a happy face on this cruel measure by pointing out that because the way the deal was wrought, previously denied veterans and homeless will now be eligible for food stamps. Even with estimated thousands being squeezed out by the new work rules, the total number of stamp recipients will increase, as will the cost. There is no “savings” here. Meaning that the only real world effect this provision has is to make it harder to eat for the vulnerable older recipients, reduced to bargaining chips by Biden-McCarthy.
And guess what? Something you probably don’t know. Biden and McCarthy have already made another, dirtier, deal. As the GOP revolt spreads this week there could easily be a move by the Matt Gaetz-Chip Roy-Julius Streicher Fan Club to defenestrate McCarthy. It takes literally only one House member to force a confidence vote on him. And though McCarthy could very easily lose the near unanimity he needs from his own party, I understand on excellent sourcing,
that some 100 plus Democrats are now prepared to vote FOR McCarthy to save his ass if necessary. The “logic” here: Better a fascist adjacent Speaker than a real fascist who would replace him.
Again, this is an error by the Democrats encouraged by Biden. It seems Old Joe gets his biggest pleasure in life by mostly ignoring the threats of chaos and insurrection posed by the MAGA Party and instead relishing the infrequent and usually inconsequential “bipartisan” bills he can squeeze out of them. He plain refuses to clean break with a party whose leadership is allied with what are clearly domestic extremists and, yes, worse. He just cannot get his head out of the Senate, an institution that ceased to function properly years ago and is basically a grave yard for social reform.
He should have refused to talk to McCarthy and allowed the Republicans to publicly, miserably fail in raising the debt ceiling on their own. Same thing with McCarthy as Speaker. If MAGA wants to replace him with a screaming meemie like Jim Jordan next month, the Democrats should say, please, by all means. Please let Jordan run the congress, run into the ground along with his Republican Party. But no sweat guys. The Biden Democrats are here to prevent any embarrassing melt-down.
A few words about the media. Well, forget TV news. That only makes you dumber. And if you read the newspapers, the good ones, if you read deep enough, if you got past the lead graphs, you probably could figure out the real story. But it wasn’t easy.
I’ve reviewed scores of newspaper leads over the last two weeks and I can summarize them in this generic but very easy to find language: “Negotiators from both parties are scrambling to find a compromise to raise this year’s debt ceiling with a bi-partisan vote. Failure to reach such a deal by June 1 would result in the US defaulting on its loan payments and could cause a major economic disruption.”
As if this crisis is some sort of deux ex machina with its own agency and its own existence and that is something that just got dropped on the heads of our two fine political parties.
And you wonder why the American people don’t know jack-shit about how their own government works? Why is that all these former Ivy Leaguers who scored 1580 (the slow ones among them) on their SAT’s and now sit in cubicles in The New York Times and The Washington Post refuse to write in simple, clear and honest English? The proper lead for this story should be: “Republican extremists in the House are holding hostage the must-pass debt ceiling bill that is due by June 1 or else the full faith and credit of the US will be severely damaged causing a global financial meltdown. The Republicans are demanding deep cuts in next year’s spending on social programs like Medicare and and other social programs or they say they will not pass the debt ceiling that merely pays off money already borrowed by the government and has no bearing on the next year’s budget. Republicans passed a new debt ceiling three times with no debate or hesitation while Donald Trump was President.”
And the American people? They are still trying to understand what raising a debt ceiling means as opposed to, say, just god damn paying the bills you owe. A real toughie for journalists to explain. +
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