Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

Ezra Klein thinks so:

As long as the Obama administration was refusing to attack Republicans publicly, my source said, they believed they could cut a deal. And that held true. They were quiet when the negotiations were going on. They were restrained after Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl walked out last week... But today they went public. The negotiations have failed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-you-know-the-negotiations-have-truly-failed/2011/05/19/AG13r5qH_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein

David Frum is highly skeptical of how Obama has handled this issue:
Yet these so-called conservative constitutionalists are doing precisely that , calling that public debt into question by refusing to vote the federal government the instrumentalities to pay its obligations.

On this issue, Obama has passed the point where he looks reasonable. He looks too weak to do the job of the presidency. And we are all left to wonder if he looks weak because he is weak.

http://www.frumforum.com/obama-is-capitulating-on-the-debt-crisis

Are we finally going to have a public fight where Obama hangs the labels 'radical', 'extremist' around the necks of the Republicans? It's two and a half years late, but maybe...

[Kuros]

If the GOP plays it to the brink, Obama can order Treasury to go ahead and pay it. He can lean on the official wording of the 14th Amendment: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." If GOP Congressmen try to sue, they'll run into standing problems. If someone does find palpable standing somehow (stemming from a cognizable or imminent injury), the Supreme Court is VERY unlikely to contradict the explicit wording of the 14th Amendment in order to prevent a sitting Executive from paying the nation's debts. It will be especially unlikely to contramand a spending order on public debts over a year after the fact.

Its all good, baby.

(http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/06/debt-ceiling-unconstitutional/39408/)

[Ya-ta Boy]

I've been reading the same things this morning.

The president would be justified in taking extreme actions to protect against a debt default. In the event that congressional irresponsibility makes default impossible to avoid, he should order the secretary of the Treasury to simply disregard the debt limit and sell whatever securities are necessary to raise cash to pay the nation�s debts...Section 4 of the 14th Amendment says, �The validity of the public debt of the United States�shall not be questioned.� This could easily justify the sort of extraordinary presidential action to avoid default that I am suggesting.

Andrew Sullivan writes: What you probably cannot do is negotiate with economic equivalent of terrorists. What Cantor and Boehner are doing is essentially letting the world know they have an economic WMD in their possession. And it will go off if you do not give them everything they want, with no negotiation possible. That's the nature of today's GOP. It needs to be destroyed before it can recover.

Ezra Klein doesn't think the 14th Amendment option is a good solution: Layering a constitutional crisis over political gridlock may work in the sense that the Obama administration will win the court case. But it�ll fail terribly in terms of sustaining the market�s confidence in our political system. That�s a step toward total breakdown, not evidence that agreement can eventually be reached and economic renewal achieved.

**
I'm inclined to agree with Klein. Forcing the president to take on more power and side-step Congress is not my prefered solution. I used to be something of a fan of checks and balances, but the present GOP is threatening to blow up the world economy to achieve a political goal I oppose.

Since negotiations with hostage-takers are not possible, I propose the Dems walk out of the meetings, Obama make a speech from the Oval Office explaining how the GOP is damaging the economy for political gain, and then whip Congress into line with something like a Pride's Purge.

I'm a little more than half-serious.

[Kuros]

Oh, frak Klein. Mainline Democrats will apparently support a President that violates the explicit wording of the Constitution when it comes to Libya, but start to get weak in the knees when the President executes a clear prerogative of his office: payment of debts incurred by Congressional budget vote.

Klein is superficial. The wording of the 14th Amendment is clear: "The validity of the public debts of the United States . . . shall not be questioned." The entire debt cieling vote is a farce; how has Congress not authorized the Executive to collect debts when it authorized the Executive to spend more income than it takes in? Only the US system has this ritual, and this ritual flies in the face of the Constitution. Authorization to spend is implied authorization to borrow . . . insofar as spending exceeds income.

[sirius black]

Its all politics and BS. The republicans don't mind going into debt to fund wars if its their wars or anything else if its they are in control but will get principled when its not their man running things. Complete BS. Not saying the Dems are any better as well. They will be hypocritical when it suits them

The fact of modern day American politics is that the members of the party are loyal ONLY to their own party and not the country. Those same parties are controlled by special interests so they ultimately serve them, NOT the average American.

[ontheway]

Sorry, but the 14th amendment argument is partisan bunk.

There is no need for the US to default on debt payments. They can pay the interest and sell bonds up to the debt limit. There is no need to exceed the limit. Obama can make all the required debt payments by declining to spend money authorized for other budgetary items. This would be the proper Constitutional response.

If Obama goes over the debt limit unilaterally, he should be impeached immediately.

[Kuros]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Kuros]

[Ya-ta Boy]

Michael Tomasky has a good article up today: "Why the GOP Loves the Debt".

Now Minnesota joins the list of states being gutted by the Republican Party. The government in the state famous for being nice has shut down, because Democratic Governor Mark Dayton wanted to impose a higher income tax on Minnesotans earning $1 million or more a year�a whopping 7,700 people in a state of 5.3 million. There are additional matters�a GOP insistence on a 15 percent reduction in state workers over the next four years, for example. And so the evidence mounts: In Saint Paul and Columbus and Tallahassee and Madison, as in Washington D.C., we are watching something that is no longer a political party in the normal sense, but a group of cynical highwaymen perpetuating a national crisis and then exploiting that very crisis to try to destroy the public sphere.

Americans will have to learn this between now and Aug. 2 (when the debt ceiling must be raised). Will the Democrats teach them? Senator Chuck Schumer has started making the argument. Will his fellow Democrats, in their usual disorganized fashion, leave him out there to say it alone, thus ensuring that the theme gets no real traction? Will the president start making these arguments? The Republicans are already trying to make an �angry black man� out of him, on the basis of his only moderately aggressive performance in Wednesday�s news conference. What he needs is to get angrier�and to explain to the country what�s really happening.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/01/the-gop-party-of-debt-and-deficits.html

From what I've observed over the last 2 1/2 years is that Obama has hewed a centrist approach, veering away from leftist goals and time after time agreeing to conservative policy proposals (individual mandate, anyone?) only to be spurned by the very people who first proposed them. In the current debt ceiling debate, the offer on the table is 83% cuts and 17% revenue increases. A few months ago a conservative think tank proposed 85/15. (My view is it should be 50% tax increases, 25% defense cuts, 25% other cuts.)

The problem is not that the 2 parties are polarized. It's that one of them has become radicalized and its only now that people are beginning to talk openly about it. About damn time.

[Kuros]

Obama can suck it. He appointed a bipartisan commission for debt reduction and promptly ignored it. Better Presidents would have taken the Bowles-Simpson Commission's advice.

[Ya-ta Boy]

^ The flaw in your analysis is that the GOP is not just 'playing the game' anymore. Back in the good old days of the Vietnam War, some general or other said, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." That mind set seems to be the dominant point of view of the Republicans.

Another part of the story is here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3096434/#43614853

[Ya-ta Boy]

Here's an interesting article on how to raise more money without raising taxes:

20,000 Leagues Under the State
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust_2011/features/20000_leagues_under_the_state030498.php?page=2

It might also go some distance in bringing some reality to those who were heard to say, "Keep your gov't hands off my Medicare". On second thought, there's probably no help for those particular people, but it might help increase awareness among other people who benefit from gov't programs who are not aware of it.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Francis Fukuyama agrees with me. I've several times mentioned that we are backing outselves into the corner of 1789 France. Here is an excerpt from Fukuyama on the same point with a nice variety of other examples:

As it happens, the willingness of the rich to defend their wealth from taxation to the point of national ruin is nothing new in world history, as Francis Fukuyama recounts in his magisterial new book The Origins of Political Order. The Han dynasty in China fell in the third century AD after aristocratic families with government connections became increasingly able to shield their ever-larger land holdings from taxation, which helped precipitate the bloody Yellow Turban peasant revolt. Nearly a millennium and a half later, the great Ming dynasty went into protracted decline in part for similar reasons: unable or unwilling to raise taxes on the landed gentry, the government couldn�t pay its soldiers and was overrun by Manchu invaders.

In the fifteenth century, the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus persuaded his reluctant nobles to accept higher taxes, with which he built a professional military that beat back the invading Ottomans. But after his death the resentful barons placed a weak foreign prince on the throne and got their taxes cut 70 to 80 percent. When their undisciplined army lost to Suleiman the Magnificent, Hungary lost its independence.

Similarly, the cash-strapped sixteenth-century Spanish monarchy sold municipal and state offices off to wealthy elites rather than raise their taxes�giving them the right to collect public revenues. The elites, in turn, raised taxes on commerce, immiserating peasants and artisans and putting Spain on a path of long-term economic decline. This same practice of exempting the wealthy from taxation and selling them government offices while transferring the tax burden onto the poor reached its apogee in ancien regime France and ended with the guillotine.

By contrast, in England during the same period, the nobility and gentry didn�t conspire with the crown to exempt themselves from taxation. Instead, thanks to a number of factors�greater social solidarity, a keener sense of foreign threats, reforms that made the government itself less corrupt, and the principle of taxation only with the consent of Parliament�the wealthy of England willingly accepted higher taxes on themselves. As a result, government spending in England rose from 11 percent of GDP in the late seventeenth century to 30 percent during some years in the eighteenth century. That�s higher than U.S. federal spending today. These higher taxes on the wealthy in England, Fukuyama notes, �did not, needless to say, stifle the capitalist revolution.�

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust_2011/editors_note/playing_chicken_with_history030506.php

Several commentators have said the GOP wants to bring it all to a head this time on the debt ceiling--no short-term fix, a final decision. I agree with them on that part. We've already squandered 6 months on this fake crisis and avoided addressing the real issue, job creation. I say, let's get on with it. Either wreck the national (and possibly the world) economy and be done with it, or let's get back to rebuilding after the last crash.

[northway]

I'm reading Fukuyama's book right now, and it's undoubtedly one of the best political science books I've ever come in contact with.