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Twice this summer House Speaker John Boehner tried for a grand bargain on deficit reduction and twice the deal collapsed, in part because there just wasn’t support from within his own conference for the increased tax revenue that Democrats demanded. Fast forward three months, and Boehner is in much the same place.
Over at the Curious Capitalist, Steve Gandel offers an approving take on Standard & Poor’s downgrade of U.S. debt. “The ratings agency’s decision on Friday to downgrade the credit rating of the U.S. government to AA+ from AAA — stripping the U.S. of the highest rating for the first time in 70 years — was [...]
The new print issue of TIME (available to subscribers) tries to make sense of the debt-limit mayhem that just consumed Washington. In it, I have a piece taking stock of the Tea Party’s amazing ability to commandeer the debt debate. What interested me most is how the Tea Party succeeded through playing by its own [...]
The conventional wisdom now dictates that every time a debt-ceiling hike comes up for a vote, Republicans will threaten to torch Uncle Sam’s credit rating unless their demands are met. Just take Senator Mitch McConnell, Washington’s most transparently devious operator, at his word: “In the future, any President, this one or another one, when they [...]
So we already know what the debt-limit debate did for leaders in Washington: nothing pretty. By and large, the American people were turned off by both parties, infuriated that political squabbling might do measurable damage to the nation’s bottom line. Some politicians, of course, lost more than others. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell proved, once [...]
With less than 11 hours left before the U.S. faced taking drastic action to avoid a default, the Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed legislation to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and trim federal deficits. The measure passed 74-26, mostly on Democratic support — 45 Democrats, one independent who caucuses with the Dems and 28 Republicans [...]
The day-to-day of Washington political debate is often little more than misdirection. All sides craft messages aimed at attracting the sympathies of select groups of voters, even if the soundbites have little or nothing to do with what is actually happening. These red herrings make headlines, but they poorly reflect policy or political realities. Here’s [...]
There are serious financial and economic dangers in the game of chicken Congress and the President are playing over raising the debt limit, but downgrades by the ratings agencies are not among them. Sure, it sounds ominous: If Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on a deal for at least $4 trillion in deficit reduction over [...]
“I won’t bore you,” President Obama said, as he broke into America’s prime time TV lineup on Monday night. This was ironic, because he went on to talk about Triple A credit ratings, Dwight Eisenhower and the debt limit. If not for him, America could have been slouching toward another Law & Order rerun, or [...]
As the U.S. hurtles toward a potential debt-limit default that would shake the fragile economy, the chasm between the two parties widened on Tuesday, as Republican opposition to tax increases calcified and Democrats bristled at the inclusion of cuts to entitlement-program beneficiaries without “shared sacrifice” from the wealthy. After meeting for more than 90 minutes [...]
