Does anyone else remember when U.S. Rep. Robert Pittenger, early in this term – his first – sent signals that he was no card-carrying Tea Party member? Running in a supposedly safe GOP district, he barely beat former county commission chairwoman Jennifer Roberts in 2012, although he outspent her by a large margin, so he needed all the support back home he could get. Gingerly approaching non-rightwing voters in his district, Pittenger said he wanted to lead a bipartisan group of freshmen members of Congress to find ways to work together to solve the country’s pressing problems. In other words, the far-right wasn’t going to rule ol’ Bob, by God; he was going to get some practical things done. Well, as the old saying goes, that shit’s over, and it’s all due to the American right wing’s increasingly pathological obsession with the Affordable Care Act.
In August, Pittenger ran into a Tea Party buzzsaw when he told a town hall meeting that he did not plan to vote to defund Obamacare. The FoxNews faithful, filled to the brim with their media heroes’ lies and distortions, all but threatened to hang Pittenger for his apostasy. Lo and behold, when push came to shove, The Pit joined the crazies who are now running his party and he became part of the GOP’s “Obamacare must go or we’ll shut down the government” temper tantrum. As the country got closer to a government shutdown last night, Pittenger put out messages that he is completely on board the Goofball Train and, in fact, he resents the fact that Obama won’t “compromise” with the GOP.
Here’s the thing, though: there’s nothing to compromise. Obamacare passed both houses of the national legislature, was signed by the president, and is now the law of the land, period. See, Tea Partiers, the way the U.S. government works is that once a bill becomes law, that’s pretty much it. If you want the law to be repealed, nothing in the Constitution mentions legislative blackmail as an acceptable tactic. Here’s how you do it: you elect more people who agree with you, including a president, and then you go through the legislative process to change or get rid of the law. Really, that’s how you do it; you can look it up. So your idea of holding a law hostage – not holding a bill hostage, mind you, but an actual law – is, how shall I put this delicately? – batshit crazy. Poll after poll shows that the public disapproves of the Republicans’ tactics, and by wide margins. Unfortunately for The Pit and other GOP reps that know their Tea Party cohorts are kind of nuts but who are going along with them anyhow, they’ve gotten themselves between the rock of public disapproval and the hard place of Tea Party intransigence. One thing for sure: the poll numbers will only look worse (much worse) if the GOP continues this insanity and continues their quixotic quest when debt ceiling time comes along. Will they really threaten to make the U.S. default, and thus throw the world economy into chaos? Or will House Speaker John “Orange Alert” Boehner finally grow a pair and put his monkeys back in their cages? Here’s hoping for the latter, but if anyone’s betting on it, I bet they push the crazy up another notch. At which point Bob Pittenger will probably have his career on the line.
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This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2013.
“once a bill becomes law, that’s pretty much it”
You mean like VoterID?
“U.S. default”
Sorry but you have bought into the media/political mis-definition of the word “default”. The definition of “default” is “not keeping current on the required interest and principal payments of a debt”. In the case of the US, that means Treasury bonds, notes and bills. The fedgov takes in far more revenue than is necessary to make said payments.
However, as the national debt increases, so does the interest & principal requirement. So, when one raises the debt ceiling, one INCREASES the probability of default.
Put another way, if I have $10,000 in credit card debt, and my minimum monthly payment is $200, I DEFAULT if I do not pay the bank $200 this month. I do NOT avoid default by asking the bank for an increase in my credit limit. Nor do I avoid default by putting some Armani suits and Dom Perignon on that maxed-out credit card.
This is third-grade math and Wiki-level * language, Mr. Grooms. Why don’t you get it?
* Wikipedia definition of “default (finance)”:
In finance, default occurs when a debtor has not met his or her legal obligations according to the debt contract, e.g. has not made a scheduled payment, or has violated a loan covenant (condition) of the debt contract. A default is the failure to pay back a loan.[1] Default may occur if the debtor is either unwilling or unable to pay his or her debt. This can occur with all debt obligations including bonds, mortgages, loans, and promissory notes.
Garth:
The problem is that the last three Republican administrations passed multiple HUGE tax cuts. thereby reducing the money available, started two wars which were never put in the budget, but were funded off budget with “emergency” spending bills, and obligated the government to huge new contractual obligations making our military heavily dependent on corporations like KBR, Halliburton, and BlackWater Security. When questioned about the runaway spending, both President Bush (43) and Vice President Cheney laughed at the interviewers and said “deficits don’t matter, did you pay cash for your house?”
Now that the other team is at the helm, they are screaming about the spending and demanding that the safety net for the “little people” be eviscerated to curb the deficits. I have a better idea: Repeal the tax cuts which we couldn’t afford to give in the first place.
When President Reagan took office after campaigning on the Tax and spend Democrats platform, the total national debt was under ONE trillion dollars.
I wonder if Dick Armey (R) had any idea what kind of genie he was letting out of the bottle when he formed the Tea Party and convinced those the least among us that it was a grass roots organization that they thought up themselves.
ArchiDLPGuy,
Your content-free partisanship is growing tiresome. Note that I said NOTHING about politics in my post on the misuse of the word “Default”.
You must have been beaten as a child. Sadly, not enough.
Let’s see one of the three chickenshits who “disliked” my apolitical clarification of the meaning of “default” refute any of the points I made in it. Especially La Grooms.
Grooms is a coward filled with hate. Look at the guy. He’s sad and pitiful. Hatred and jealousy fuel him.
At least John Grooms puts his name and face out there every week, unlike cowardly Internet dipshits who hurl anonymous insults in a pathetic effort to make themselves feel important. Like Groomisanidiot.
the repooplinuts are fuggin nutso, theyre caught up in a universe of fox lies and rush limboob bs, its us against them people, if you want banned books and institutional racism, go repoopliphuck
First, thanks to Leo Dulcer for taking up for my hate-filled, sad and pathetic self.
OK, Garth, you wanted a reply to your “explanation” of default, today I’ve got time so here you go. Let’s use your published Wikipedia definition of default: default occurs when a debtor has not met his or her legal obligations according to the debt contract. Here, though, is where you misinterpret the whole thing.
The “debt ceiling” needs to be raised in order to provide money for the US to pay for programs, projects, etc that have already been passed. In other words, the money that will be made available by raising the debt limit IS ALREADY OWED to creditors. That is, raising the debt limit isn’t about approving new future debts, it is about agreeing to pay the debts the country has NOW. So when Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit in order to pay for the things they’ve already passed, the country is, in effect, defaulting on its responsibility to make its payments on time. And when the country that is still the strongest element of the international financial system actually defaults on its debts, that, Mr. Vader, is a great big huge hairy deal – which is why financial experts worldwide are practically crapping themselves waiting to see if the GOP will pull that trigger.
THAT is what’s going on with the default controversy; it has nothing to do with agreeing to raise the limit on a metaphorical credit card. Let’s say it one more time so even groomsisanidiot can understand — it is an agreement to pay for things that have already been bought.
Needless to say, it’s anyone’s guess how many times this needs to be explained to Rush worshippers, Louie Gohmert fans, etc. It’s something the mainstream press, in its current state of decomposition, has done a miserable job explaining, never mind the blatant spinners and liars at Fox and wingnut radio.
Well Mr. Grooms I don’t agree with your premise that one should try to buy a Maserati on a waitress’s salary, but I’ll humor you on that point to get to two more fundamental questions:
1. How, exactly, does the government receive money when it enacts deficit spending? (Hint: the answer is not “from China” as foreign ownership of US Treasury paper has been decreasing.) Again, be precise. The Congressional Budget Office says the deficit for Fiscal Year 2013 was $642 billion… trace that $642 billion back from the Treasury Department to its source.
2. How and when do you propose the debt spiral be reversed? Your answer should acknowledge that 2013 saw the federal government collect an all-time high amount of tax revenue ($2.47 trillion according to the Treasury Department’s August 2013 monthly statement found at http://www.fms.treas.gov/mts/mts0813.pdf)
Um, Garth, would you care to answer my post directly before you launch into you “Professor of Economics” persona? Your new questions, in any case, are irrelevant to what I wrote, which was a rebuttal of your incorrect interpretation of what a government default entails. The day I actually have time to “take questions” from readers who won’t even sign their real names is the day you can rest assured someone else is writing under my name.
What part of your post warrants answers? Rather than asking questions, or even projecting a facade of decorum, it’s your usual foaming-at-the-mouth crapola of feeble guilt-by-association taunts attempting to tie me to Limbaugh (sorry, don’t listen to him), Fox (sorry, don’t watch them), and the GOP (sorry, didn’t vote for their Presidential, gubernatorial, or Congressional candidate in either 2008 or 2012) rather than sticking to the issue at hand.
One needn’t be a “Professor of Economics” to understand how deficit spending is financed. However I do appreciate you admitting that when it comes to such matters, you are “punching up” intellectually.
The relevance of my deficit financing question to your previous post is the following:
1. The Treasury sells bonds to Primary Dealers, an elite set of twenty-one Investment Banks. The roster of PDs reads like a literal Murderers’ Row of Wall Street: Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS, etc.
2. The Primary Dealers then sell their Treasury paper to The Federal Reserve. The Fed uses “money” that it creates out of nothing to fund these purchases. The technical term for this is “POMO, or Permanent Open Market Operation”. However, there is nothing “Open Market” about this, since The Fed has become the near-exclusive purchaser of T-Bonds (this is why I advised not including “China” in my previous post).
3. The Primary Dealers collect a commission for flipping their Treasuries, and they also sell at a profit. This explains why the internal desks at most of these PDs report that they go weeks or months on end without ever having a “losing” day.
4. The flood of created-out-of-nothing funds the Fed uses results in an increase in the money supply, leading to inflation (more dollars chasing the same quantity of goods and services). As you should know, inflation benefits those at the top of the economic ladder (banks, corporations) while further impoverishing those at the bottom (the unemployed, the poor, the retired). Oh, and disregard the “official” CPI inflation number – 25% of that figure is derived from an imaginary calculation of housing costs called “Owners’ Equivalent Rent”. If you shop for groceries you know that inflation is NOT 2%.
So when you say – with an eloquence you alone possess – that “financial experts worldwide are practically crapping themselves”, those “experts” to whom you refer are the Wall Street criminal class (Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, Brian Moynihan of BofA which owns Merrill Lynch) who are accumulating literally hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The Fed’s current purchase program is at $85 billion a month, which covers the entire federal deficit, despite Bernanke’s claim that “we are not monetizing the debt”).
So now that I’ve answered the first of my questions, it’s your turn to answer the second:
How high do you think the national debt should go before we must either start paying it down or go off into a hyperinflationary spiral that ends with blood in the streets?
Once again, Garth, the day you start posting under your own name like a mensch, I’ll consider taking your questions.
How pathetic. Do you pull that “anonymous poster” weak sauce on your sockpuppet DLP? What if I signed my posts “John Smith”? Or “Benedict Cumberbatch”? Those are “real” names…. more real than “DLP” at least.
Would that make them more legitimate in your eyes? Of course not, because you’re not really concerned with your readers’ real names; you just can’t answer the two simple questions I posed:
1. How is deficit spending financed?
2. What is the highest national debt figure that is acceptable to you?
Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll go you one further. I work uptown near the Mint Museum complex. Meet me for lunch at E2. Pick a date and a time. I will know you by the smug of your jib.
Deal?
You don’t have the courage to use your own name on your public pronouncements, and you expect someone else to give a rip about what you have to say? THAT is almost the very definition of one of your favorite words: Pathetic. Tell you what I’LL do. I’ll no longer respond in any way to any comments that aren’t signed by someone with the courage of his/her convictions, and that goes for comments from the right, left, middle or upside down. The internet is overrun with commenting cowards, and it’s time for you to either take full responsibility for your comments or take a hike.