Debt bomb - Kevin Williamson makes two salient points in this post "
Enron writ large": one is that the S&P downgrade is (like Enron) a lagging indicator of what everybody already knows and the other is that if rates return to historic levels, interest payments on the national debt could quickly eclipse the big-ticket items in the federal budget.
4 comments:
The S&P downgrade is less a lagging indicator, and more of a warning shot at the Tea Party wing of the GOP. It specifically mentions political gridlock as the primary factor in its decision.
The last time S&P did this was, not so coincidentally, in response to the previous "maybe we won't raise the debt limit" noise coming from Congress.
So "Let's all get along and keep spending"? That seems like how we got here.
I'll take gridlock over the continued fiscal insanity.
Nope. You won't.
Paul Ryan's budget would necessitate raising the debt ceiling.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-shining--national-debt-edition/2011/04/20/AFnfSICE_story.html
"The House Republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt in the next decade yet the GOP is balking at raising the debt limit." I thought about making this week’s column that one sentence printed over and over 30 times.
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The supposedly “courageous,” “visionary” Paul Ryan plan — which already contains everything Republicans can think of in terms of these spending cuts — would add more debt than we’ve ever seen over a 10-year period in American history. Yet Ryan and other House GOP leaders continue to make outrageous statements to the contrary.
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“The spending spree is over,” Ryan said the other day, after the House passed his blueprint. “We cannot keep spending money we don’t have.” Except that by his own reckoning Ryan is planning to spend $6 trillion we don’t have in the next decade alone.
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Yes, I know: The Democrats’ plans are no better on the debt... But at least Democrats aren’t rattling markets by hypocritically holding the debt limit hostage while planning to add trillions in fresh debt themselves.
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The classic definition of chutzpah was a kid who kills his parents and then asks for the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan. The new definition of chutzpah is Republicans who vote for the Ryan plan that adds trillions in debt and who then say the debt limit goes up only over their dead bodies!"
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