Last Monday the President of the United States blamed the debt ceiling impasse on the so-called Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives. Said Mr. Obama in his nationwide prime time televised address, they can be compared to a scattering of others before them who “held fast to rigid ideologies and who refused to listen to those who disagreed.” Here’s the segment of Mr. Obama’s address from which this quote was taken.
The Tea Party members, for their part, seem to be refusing to go along with a debt limit increase when the quid pro quo is Mr. Obama’s promise that there will be cuts, trust me. The Tea Party apparently asks for promised cuts and also Congressional approval of a balanced budget constitutional amendment which does not become law until it is adopted by 3/4 of the states.
In the view of the President, the rigid ones, the Tea Partyers, won’t be remembered for their ideological stand for less debt or a balanced budget amendment. Instead, according to Mr. Obama, the ones we should and do remember are those, supposedly like him I guess, who “put country above self . . . .” and who “. . . set personal grievances aside for the greater good.” This is nonsensical. The Tea Party has no animosity towards anyone. Most of the Tea Partyers are not even interested in being re-elected if they don’t achieve this goal. They want to balance the books. Plain and simple, their goal is to put this country on track to live within it’s means.
The public is apparently mad at the Tea Party. The public is, according to the polls, clamoring for a “compromise” which I think means simply that they want to go back to life as usual. Stop messing with the credit markets. A plague on both your houses. Stop threatening us with fewer benefits or more taxes. Just stop, stop, stop.
The people calling for compromise now are the same ones as those who called for compromise when Bill Clinton faced down a Republican Congress back in 1995. Clinton faced a Congress which wanted a significant change in the business of government as usual. This Congress, the first Republican Congress in 40 years, passed budgets with significantly lower budget deficits and no tax cuts. President Clinton, however, vetoed several of the budgets they passed and shut down the government before the Congress gave him what he liked. The ones we remember, President Obama says, are those who set aside pride and party to “form a more perfect union.” Mr. Clinton is, however, now widely revered and Mr. Gingrich, the leader of that Congress, is still largely reviled.
If the current situation is a replay of 1995 the Tea Party insurgents are playing the role of the fiscally conservative Republicans who came to Washington to cut the budget that year. The 1995 insurgents were pilloried in the press as being too extreme and in seeking to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. They just wanted to cut too much. Mr. Clinton shut down the government rather than give in to the Republican congress. In 1995 the people called for compromise, they just wanted to be left alone. And they got it and 16 years later we’re much worse off than we were then.
I think that President Clinton beat the 1995 Congress because we the people knew that the Congress was calling for something like austerity. Something like a balanced budget. Something which would change our cushy lives. We the people have reached the same point today only the Congress is divided. And the Tea Party holds a significant power base in only one chamber. We the people, however, want to go back to what we had before. We don’t want to be bothered by budget cuts and other revenue enhancements.
In 2011 when we answer our phones to talk to pollsters we say we want compromise. We act superior and tell them that we just want the politicians to act like adults!!! But we know, in our hearts, that what we really want is just business as usual. We’re happy to shoot the messenger. We wish to eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die!!! In the present case, as it was in 1995, the money we are spending will be paid back, after we die, by our children and grandchildren. We don’t want to cut the budget today or over the next eight years or ever for that matter. We avoid this because it will hurt. That is the bottom line. We the People aren’t really weary of the ‘ideological warfare’ between spenders and savers, we just don’t want to cut up the credit card just yet. We erroneously thought that we were willing to cut up the card when we elected fiscally concerned members in November of 1994 as well as in November of 2010. Now, when it comes to the pointy end of the spear or the sharp edge of the budget axe, we really just prefer not to change.
Unfortunately, either a minority like the Tea Party is going to need to hang tough and make us fix this although they’ll be acting in a throroughly undemocratic way. Or alternatively things will change when someone comes from the outside, like the rating agencies, and forces us to change. But we won’t believe that they will do it until they do do it. Until then we will continue to believe that we can be rich by collecting the printed dollar bills dropped from airplanes and helicopters. In fact if gold itself, all of a sudden, became as commonplace as paper, we couldn’t get rich by picking that up off the ground either. We will only stop when we have no ability to fool ourselves and stop looking to others to pay our bills. This, I think, is the meaning of what the rating agencies are telling us. They, the agencies, are just losing confidence in our willingness to be grown ups, and by that I mean somebody willing to cut back on their current expenses in order to pay the debts they incurred for goods and services previously provided. In the end we’ll get what we deserve unless we decide to support this strange ideology which believes that we need to pay our own bills now and stop putting the hard things off.
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