It’s been two weeks since the curtain rose on The Great Debt Limit Drama; one of the major political parties has settled on its gleaning strategy; and the media has digested it, with only a low stomach rumble persisting. The Propaganda Division of the ruling party is drawing down from regiment size to a few precautionary battalions. Those on the out are still analyzing, trying to figure out who was on what side of this Tet Offensive. Has the media turned a military defeat into a political victory, as in that other Tet Offensive? It may be years before a General Giap appears on the scene to give us the straight story.
For those of us who are willing to admit that we are not politically omniscient, we are left with the meager visible facts. One more time, my nascent opinion rests on a pitifully small number of facts. The worry, which a number of sideline observers have voiced publicly, is whether the facts in that small quantity were salient and causative factors.
The way it looked to me:
1. The debt limit “compromise” bill was passed by the House and the Senate and subsequently signed by the President into law.
2. One of the credit / financial rating agencies rather quickly downgraded The United States from an AAA rating (its highest) to AA+ (one step lower), and added a financial Negative Outlook attribute for good measure.
3. The amount of the increase in the debt ceiling is sufficient to allow the U.S. to keep borrowing until well after the next presidential election.
4. Social Security checks went out on schedule, no military personnel missed a paycheck, medical providers received their Medicare / Medicaid payments, the millions of federal employees and contract personnel got paid, and Old Faithful had sufficient energy to keep erupting on schedule.
Now it’s down to somewhat lesser facts:
5. The President publicly repeated over and over that failure to increase the Debt Ceiling would cause the U. S. to default on its bond holder interest payments. At a later point he changed the wording to “default on its solemn obligations”.
6. The President publicly stated a number of times that he “could not guarantee that Social Security checks would go out” if the Debt Ceiling were not increased. A few times he said the same for Medicare and Defense Department personnel payments.
7. The Treasury Secretary also kept publicly iterating his stock disaster warnings, similar to the President’s.
8. Some number of months before the Debt Ceiling deadline, the Treasury Secretary assured us in a televised interview that “there is no chance of a credit agency downgrade”.
At this point we segue to other minor facts, plus a few “what-if” speculations:
9. Neither the President nor the Treasury Secretary ever publicly mentioned that the expected monthly income of the United States is sufficient to pay (a) bond holders, (b) Social Security recipients, (c) Medicare claims, and (d) Department of Defense payroll, with tens of billions of dollars left over.
10. Neither the President nor the Treasure Secretary ever mentioned that there is no legal barrier to prioritizing federal government payments, allowing bond holders to be paid first (about $40 billion out of the expected $165 – $200 billion monthly income).
11. Did the Treasury Secretary, or other Obama Administration official, ever privately tell the credit rating agencies that there was no danger whatsoever of default and that Administration rhetoric was just “political leveraging”? It’s unlikely that we will find out.
12. Did the President really take the Treasury Secretary’s “no downgrade” assertion at face value, without polling other knowledgeable people on his staff? If so, perhaps he should turn to a better source (like the Tea Party?).
13. There seems to be general agreement among media pundits that scaring “the old people on Social Security” continues to be an effective Democratic Party tactic. Is the apparent diminished capacity epidemic among our senior citizens for real?
14. Did the Republican leadership do a Charlie Brown, falling on its hind side when Lucy (AKA Democrats) yanked the football away from the tee at the last second—again? Undoubtedly all those Lucys are still giggling.
15. Did the Republicans learn any lessons from the attempts to scale the Everest mountain of U.S. debt? It does appear that a sizable percentage have come to believe that it is not possible for our country to continue spending trillions more per year than the country’s income.
16. Did the Democrats learn any lessons from the country’s unfettered credit-card spending? The rhetoric of Democratic leaders indicates no! But could it be that our President is smarter and more clever than most of us give him credit for? Might he be just executing tactics from Alinsky and Marx, taking advantage of de Toqueville’s excellent hint about voting the treasury in a democracy, as keys to his Grand Strategy, whatever that might be? If the debt escalation continues as at present, all of us will know for sure in five years or less.
Posted by thedrake01 
