Senators and Congress members are not short order cooks. Dopey domineering doofus DONALD JOHN TRUMP and his richest-man-in-the-world henchman, ELON MUSK, are hideous belligerent bullies whose arrogant approach to governing is demeaning to our democracy. What do you think? From The Washington Post:
Trump and Musk show how not to conduct the nation’s business
Although they sowed needless chaos before the holidays, the points they raised are worth exploring.
No matter what one thinks about the negotiations’ particulars, everyone should agree that this is not the way to conduct the nation’s business.
Mr. Trump should not have spurred a last-minute frenzy to keep the government running during the holidays when a reasonable bipartisan compromise had already been reached. The negotiators’ job was made harder by the fact that Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, the president-elect’s confidant tasked with making the government more “efficient,” seemed to be at cross-purposes in their demands. Mr. Musk said the stopgap’s spending levels were “criminal” and called for shutting down the government until Mr. Trump’s inauguration, when Republicans would have more leverage to deny line items Democrats wanted. Chiming in later, Mr. Trump criticized some of the spending but also issued a very different demand: that Congress lift the debt limit or eliminate it entirely, which would have required Democratic buy-in, given the narrow majorities in Congress and some Republicans’ aversion to raising the fiscal ceiling.
ither demand should have been made weeks ago — not less than a week before the government was set to close. If Mr. Trump wanted to assure Americans that his second term will be less chaotic than his first, this was not the way. If anything, the addition of Mr. Musk to the mix appears to have made things even more volatile. Predictably, Democrats resisted the last-minute push, along with a group of Republican lawmakers who balked at raising the debt ceiling.
The episode is all the more frustrating because both Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump had at least a kernel of a point worth making.
Mr. Musk is right that federal spending needs trimming. The national debt is on an unsustainable course, and the government spends too much to see to its core responsibilities. But rightsizing the federal budget requires at least two things: modest adjustments to Medicare and Social Security, and economic growth to make the U.S. debt burden smaller as a percentage of the economy. Mr. Musk’s demands would have helped little with either. (In fact, government shutdowns deal at least short-term damage to the economy, as a Congressional Budget Office report showed regarding the five-week shutdown that started in December 2018.)
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, is right that the federal debt limit should be reformed, if not abolished. Republicans have repeatedly held hostage the country’s full faith and credit by declining to lift the debt limit absent policy concessions from Democrats. In 2o11 and 2023, the maneuver took the nation perilously close to forcing the U.S. treasury to default on government obligations. The economic consequences of such a default would be catastrophic, given that people across the world would question the reliability of U.S. bonds, a mainstay asset of the global economy.
To be clear: Lifting the debt limit does not authorize any new spending; it merely allows the government to borrow money to finance spending Congress has already committed to. At best, it forces Congress to at least acknowledge, by routinely voting to lift it, that the spending lawmakers have authorized requires ever-higher debt levels to conduct. But the misuse of the debt limit for political purposes in recent years shows that maintaining the fiscal ceiling is not worth the risk of Congress stumbling into economic catastrophe when one party refuses to lift it without a payoff.
Democrats should be eager to work with Mr. Trump on debt limit reform that mitigates the possibility of one party using it as leverage to force policy change. It would be good for the country — and probably for the next Democratic president facing a concerted GOP opposition in Congress, too. When Mr. Trump finds his way to proposing something worthwhile, Democrats should take him up on it.
Harder, but still worth doing, would be working with Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk or anyone else in the incoming administration to make federal spending more efficient, if and when they identify reasonable places to economize.
But it takes two to deal — and time. Last-minute, ad hoc legislative theatrics will gain Mr. Trump — and the country — far less than a more reasonable approach would. Meanwhile, the nation will suffer amid confidence-sapping uncertainty and political confusion.
1 comment:
Something I see Republicans do now and then is say and do something to piss people off or cause controversy, and then swoop in and play the hero.. just for attention and to maintain validity. That happened with the State Park fluke here recently. Trump does it constantly. They feed off people's stupidity.
Post a Comment