The Ridiculous Crisis

What they are doing in Washington is ridiculous nonsense; why they are doing it is not. A really important, knock-down, drag-out political fight is at the heart of it. This is a fight that is only in its opening round and, as a result of this agreement, promises a sequence of crises through the next decade. Our politics are not in crisis; our values are.


The New Deal served us well through War II and the postwar era. That structure moderated and protected society from the abuses and excesses of the market. It set up a social safety net for the poor, the ill and the elderly and assumed responsibility for the macroeconomy. It advocated and fostered equal opportunity for all.


Then, in the 1970s and 80s, that New Deal structure came under attack by a group of home-grown ideologues who believe that government is inherently hostile to individual freedom. The solution these neo-conservatives offer for every problem is to continuously cut taxes, and therefore spending, in search of an ever smaller, less intrusive and less effective government. This is a clear attack on the New Deal safety-net society.


The neo-conservatives have now set the agenda for the Tea Party, the Republican Party and our national politics. Politics is now about the size of government and the amount of taxing and spending. The normal political agenda of education, health, infrastructure and other public goods addressed by democratic societies has been set aside because less government is presumed to be better government. More importantly, the conservatives welcome crisis with its political and economic disruption as a justified means to achieve smaller government.


The operative phrase in Washington for this disruption is “economic catastrophe.” If the federal government had not raised the debt ceiling, the pundits assure us, America would be in default, and the world economy would have come tumbling down in an economic catastrophe. If we do not get control of our deficits and debt, if we do not control Medicare costs, if we do not control entitlements, we are headed for and an economic catastrophe. The Tea Party stands ever ready to bring on such catastrophes.


The latest and continuing debt ceiling crisis was created as a convenient excuse for the Tea Party manipulators to try to force cuts in social spending that they can't get through the regular legislative process. In this round, they succeeded. One way or another, there will be $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years. But it is ridiculous to cut spending now. The fragile economic recovery is faltering for lack of spending by the middle class. It would be like bleeding the patient.The government should be doing just the opposite, giving a $1 trillion stimulus transfusion.


As soon as President Obama accepted the Tea Party agenda of budget cuts, he committed the country to a series of crises points where the Tea Party can again and again blackmail our government into an ever worsening series of crises. That Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, made up of six each Republicans and Democrats, is supposed to identify $1.5 trillion in cuts by November 23. Quite aside from the fact that it is a cowardly refusal by Congress to face accountability, there is no way they can come to agreement. We are facing $1.2 trillion in automatically triggered across-the-board reductions over 10 years.


This whole debt crisis exercise is ridiculous. Clearly, there is no debt crisis. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire, as they will automatically on December 31, 2012, will provide $4 trillion in revenue over 10 years, almost twice the total $2.1 trillion proposed in the deficit reduction package. Without doing anything, we can have the funds to write down about $2 trillion of debt, not that we would want to. The 10 year span is likewise ridiculous. Ten years ago we had a fiscal surplus and were worried about the consequences of paying off the entire debt. And no Congress can bind the next one to anything anyway.


Our political system is poised to stumble through reoccurring manufactured crises that will also be ridiculous and have no relationship to reality. But this is not the kind of political wrangling we are accustomed to. It is not an “in the family” dispute. The Tea Party movement is based on ideology. It sees not an opponent but an enemy, someone not to be trusted, not to be respected and not to be negotiated with. It is visceral, nasty and ideological. I would even say, un-American.


Yet here we are, fighting to maintain the New Deal against accusations that have no basis in fact and with a president who values the perception of compromise as his greatest achievement.