Once more, the Debt Ceiling...with feeling

The Republican pitch sounds plausible--they won't vote for raising the debt ceiling unless the Democrats get serious about spending reduction, because the deficit is the single most important issue before America today.

But the more you unpack their pitch, the less plausible it becomes. And the real reason becomes more visible: the Republicans' attempt to achieve minority rule over America.

Start at the end. Not only is the deficit not our most pressing issue (not that it isn't pressing), but the behavior of the Republican Party has demonstrated a complete disregard for the deficit over the past 13 years.

You can't be sure of what a party's spending priorities are when it isn't in power. Nowadays the GOP acts as if a different party was in power during the Bush II era of misrule. As if they collectively had a conversion "on the road to Damascus" the instant President Obama took the oath of office in 2008. But it's the same people. Even the so-called Tea Party Republicans aren't new to politics. Nearly all Tea Party activists are long-time Republican activists who are both social and fiscal conservatives, but who conceal their social activism until they gain office, and then go to town on their pet social issues, mostly oriented towards retrofitting women to the 1950 standards Tea Party types fondly recollect.

So--why talk about deficits if you don't mean it? To conceal the real goal, which is to cripple the federal government.

Why want to cripple the federal government? To prevent them from being able to effectively regulate the rich and powerful, who almost invariably have as their life goals becoming even more rich and more powerful. Only government stands between the solitary individual citizen and the rich and powerful, especially since the American union movement has been largely destroyed outside the public sector (and that's well on the way down the tubes--in part due to public sector employee avarice, to be honest).

The other reason to trumpet the deficit deceitfully is Southern white revanchism. Many white Southerners (and their rural soulmates in other states) are still fighting the Civil War. Look at their near-psychotic hatred of President Obama for a hint about this. Leftists hated Bush, of course, given his unusual mixture of towering ambition coupled with mediocre abilities--but they never claimed he wasn't an American citizen. They never claimed he wasn't a Christian. They never claimed he hated America. They never compared him to a monkey. And, of course, Bush was by historians' estimates the 6th worst president in American history, while Obama was rated as 15th best. Meaning that leftists' dislike of Bush was also more justifiable.

One more sign of the deceitfulness of the GOP's talk about the deficit being the most important thing is their rejection of ending the Bush tax cuts across the board--which would be best for reducing the deficit in immediate terms. And their rejection of any cuts to military spending. And their unwillingness to state just which so-called entitlements they'd cut, beyond general platitudes. It all makes their talk about the deficit a hollow trojan horse.

It's all about the deficit, stupid. Or is it?

If the national debt is, as the Republican leadership says daily, the Number One problem facing America, then they should have been voting for all the Bush tax cuts expiring and the sequestration happening, since those would reduce the national debt substantially.

Only they're against both those things, which means right off the bat that they don't think the deficit is our number one problem. The deficit uber alles meme is propaganda. We have a deficit problem, but the Republicans are using it as a cover for their real agenda--as their opposition to letting the tax cuts for the richest of the rich expire, and to shrinking some of the costliest aspects of government. Above all they're not serious about the deficit because they refuse to name exactly what government benefits they'd shrink or cut off.

It's easy to talk about the debt as this huge problem in the abstract. But fixing it requires doing things nearly everyone doesn't want: reducing particular government services and raising nearly everyone's taxes. 

Of course Republicans want to reduce the size of government. Or so they say. But one of the biggest contributors to the size of government is the military. And that's sacrosanct, despite the complete absence of another world power capable of meeting us on the battlefield anywhere, and the fact that we spend more on our military than the next 13 nations combined.

Another very large source is overspending on medical care by doctors and hospitals doing tests and procedures that have been proven not to be useful for the patient's situation. But Republicans cry "death panels" if you bring up this little $700 billion item. 

And another very large item is rich people's tax dodges--fake company headquarters in overseas tax havens and other dirty tricks that rob the treasury of the nation's fair share of their income. But that's sacrosanct too, because apparently rich people are emotionally fragile and will withdraw from commerce if we hurt their feelings. 

Yet another huge component is welfare, all right--corporate welfare. Farm subsidies to giant agribusinesses. Oil subsidies to companies with a bigger GNP than half the world's countries. And a welter of industry-specific, taxpayer-funded special deals for every business sector that can send a team of lobbyists with bags of campaign donation money to Washington. 

So it's not the size of government per se that the Republicans want to cripple. It's the ability of government to protect you and me from being stomped on by the kind of people who keep teams of lawyers on retainer that bothers the corporatists, along with the ability of government to protect minorities from the Southern white establishment in the states of the old Confederacy. 

The Republicans want to turn the federal government into a giant, toothless cash cow for the financial benefit of the GOP's corporate/Wall Street benefactors and "bigotry benefit" of its undereducated, aging white Southern/Midwestern "base." 

Business needs Predictability

Wait, wasn't it the Republican Party saying every day in every way that the #1 task for government was to provide a stable, predictable environment for business so jobs would be created?

And now the selfsame party has taught businesses here and abroad that America's ascendant party is willing to put welching on our debts on the table? Even if they now agreed to pass a clean debt limit bill good until after the next election, considerable damage has already been done.

In business, what is your word worth? What happens to your business if your customers, suppliers and competitors find out that your word isn't solid?

When your neighbor starts waving a gun around, even if he doesn't shoot it--you're going to treat him very, very differently thereafter.

Especially when this crisis came from the Republicans tying our willingness to pay our bills to our incurring future debts.

But even if we cut up all our national credit cards we still have to pay our debts. Even if you disagree about whether we should have incurred those debts, that has nothing to do with paying our debts.

And if the deficit does matter--unlike what the #2 Republican said from 2000-2008--what the GOP has already done is driving interest rates up on government borrowing, because we're seen as less trustworthy now by foreign lenders.

Which will drive the deficit up as even more government income--i.e. the taxes we all pay--is diverted from actually doing things to debt service.

So the Republicans preach economic stability, then sabotage it; they preach deficit reduction, then raise our deficit wholly unnecessarily; they preach conservatism, then act like whirley-eyed bomb-throwing anarchists.

Should I just assume that when the Republican leadership says anything they actually mean its exact opposite?

The debt ceiling gives a blank check to the ever-growing Federal government!

Wrong. The debt ceiling is for our debts we've already incurred. That's why it's called the debt ceiling. At this instant our government's debts exceed revenues and fungible resources--as was also true, spectacularly, at the instant President Obama took office in 2008. This would remain true even if our federal government stopped spending anything it wasn't legally required to spend right now.

If you as an individual welch on your debts, you lose whatever assets your debtors can lay their hands on and your credit rating tanks. Then when you want to borrow money later on, you're going to pay the rates people with bad credit ratings pay--if you can borrow at all.

When a nation welches on its debts it can hang onto its assets unless it still has to borrow. But when and if it does, Whoa Nellie. And nations that welch on their debts always have to borrow. And the new higher rates ripple through the economy, affecting all but the very rich.

The time to question the need for a higher debt limit was when the deb were being incurred--when we went to war in two countries and gave the richest of the rich a sweet tax break, and put it all on the national credit card, passing the bill on to the next President, along with the reckless fiscal policies that the nation had to bail out when that bubble popped.

And the Republican Congress did vote to raise the debt limit--seven times during the Bush era. It appears that deficits don't count unless a Democrat is in the White House. Then suddenly it becomes the biggest crisis in American history. And jobs? Turns out that's not important at all. Which is logical. All the members of congress have jobs themselves, after all.

It's time to spend, spend, spend

No, I'm not kidding. All across America our infrastructure is crumbling. It absolutely will be repaired--we're not about to let our interstate highway system and bridges and dams and levees and sewer pipes and plants and water pipes and power lines go away. And deferred maintenance is usually tripled maintenance--meaning that its costs vastly less to fix things before they're totally broke.

My alcoholic grandmother is a perfect example of the Republican Congress. She bought a new Chevrolet in 1956 and never added oil or got it changed. And back then engines leaked oil--you always had some drip on the garage floor.

Eventually--after about 16,000 miles as I recall--the oil level dropped to the point that the engine seized.

Now compare the cost of a new engine vs. a couple of oil changes and a few quarts in between. Not to mention the experience of driving the car at the moment the engine seizes.

That's what's going on with our infrastructure. Remember reading about that bridge collapsing in the Midwest and killing a bunch of people? That was the poster child for the cost of deferred maintenance.

And it doesn't have to be quite that dramatic. A few years ago I hit a huge pothole while driving our camper van on a local freeway. The awning above the sliding door popped open and deployed at 65mph, costing us time and money that will never be counted as part of the cost of not repairing that pothole.

Now multiple my own little example by millions, and add that to official estimates of the multiplying factors of the costs of deferred maintanance.

Right now we are firing the people needed to do all this maintenance locally, regionally, and nationally, in the name of deficit reduction. This is exactly the same as a company balancing its books by refusing to pay its bills. It is exactly the same as calling Social Security an entitlement when most of it is our money, withdrawn from our paychecks throughout our working lives, then "borrowed" by Congress to spend on other things--and now telling us they don't want to pay back the money they "borrowed" from us--and that it's really not our money anyway--that we're living too long and there aren't enough young workers to support retirees.

Well, not as long as the hedge fund manager who got $4.7B for his labors last year paid 15% on his income, like all his fellow hedge fund managers and most of Wall Street's Masters of the Universe. What tax rate did you pay on your income?

I can't see how a party can call itself "conservative" and at the same time advocate welching on debts and stepping over dollars to pick up nickels via deferred maintenance. That's not how you economize. Our infrastructure is not a luxury. It's the core of what a government provides its people--and it's going to be paid, either now for X dollars or a few years for now for 3X or even 5X dollars (plus lives lost here and there).

The time for government to economize and lay off staff is when the economy is booming and the private sector can absorb laid-off government workers. The time for government to spend--yes, deficit spend--is when the private sector isn't hiring (or in the current case, hiring plenty of workers in China and Sri Lanka etc. but not in America) and the workers are needed to do maintenance projects that have to be done anyway.

Unless the Republican Party's vision of our future is for us to once more become hunters and gatherers in the forest in bands of warring tribes of a few dozen each. Is that what they really mean when they champion a "traditional lifestyle" ?