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?