There was a time in which it was possible to govern the United States without having to battle, threaten and negotiate with your opponents every few months in order to avert some financial crisis or another. My memory of such a time is rapidly, rapidly fading. It seems impossible for so much as three months to pass without a sequester, debt ceiling or funding authority expiry deadline looming.
Of course, this wouldn’t be such a problem if Tea Party congresspeople weren’t able to control their party and attempt to hold the directly elected President to ransom. The only good news is that this state of affairs cannot continue: the Tea Party will alienate so much of the public that the GOP ceases to tolerate them, much as Labour threw out Militant in the 1980s. Either that or the Tea Party ascends to power, but that doesn’t look very likely at the moment. Whatever happens, we are guaranteed at least one repeat of yesterday’s crisis.
The Republican leadership has conceded defeat over Obamacare, but that didn’t seem to give them any ability to reach a permanent solution. The federal government has only been given authority to spend until early January, and the new debt ceiling will be reached a month later. There is just a three month interval until America lurches into another crisis. As our politicians are so good at doing, they have solved nothing. They’ve just postponed the problem.
And at what cost? The shutdown and uncertainty surrounding US debt has wiped an estimated $24,000,000,000 off the US economy and resulted in much human suffering, as I outlined in my earlier post, ‘This Is Why You CAN’T Shut Down A Government’. Interestingly, the debt ceiling was actually reached in May, and the US Treasury resorted to ‘extraordinary measures’ to balance the books for the past 5 months. So I can only imagine what hidden costs of quasi debt will hit the Treasury in mean time.
So of course it’s justified to do this in order to blackmail the White House into dropping legitimate legislation (!)