The shutdown as well as the looming debt ceiling crisis is
entirely a Republican Party production.
By Donald Kaul
Everyone pretty much
agrees that what’s going on in Washington right now ranks up there with the
dumbest, most destructive episodes in our history.
We are a great and
powerful country, on the cusp of achieving that “Shining City upon a Hill”
status that Puritan leader John Winthrop talked about nearly 400 years ago.
I mean it. We have the
ability to have it all: peace, prosperity, health, happiness.
Polls taken beforehand
indicate that only about 45
percent of Americans would blame the Republicans for the
government shutdown. A third think the Democrats are at fault. And an
additional 13 percent say both are to blame.
No. Not true. Wrong.
This mess — the
shutdown as well as the looming debt ceiling crisis — is entirely a Republican
Party production. The Republicans created it out of thin air, motivated by a
fear of the tea party and an odd obsession with standing in the way of an
expansion of health care for millions of Americans who are going without it.
They’ve called the
Affordable Care Act a train wreck, a disaster, and another Pearl Harbor.
What utter nonsense.
It is instead a law passed by Congress and signed by the president of the
United States, who then won re-election by five million votes. The Supreme Court
has ruled it Constitutional.
What more do you want,
the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval?
Republicans say that
polls show that a slim majority of Americans don’t support the law. What they
don’t say is that a full quarter of those people favor a further extension of
the law, not repeal. The opposition to it is largely the result of the constant
drumbeat of lies, exaggerations, and propaganda that Republicans have sent out
over the past two years.
The law isn’t perfect
— no one claims it is — but the message from the voters is clear: Don’t kill
it, make it better.
Another general
misconception is that the national debt is our biggest problem and the budget
must be cut to shave it. No and no.
Cutting government
spending in hard times only makes times harder. We’re already hurting the
economy by cutting government employment too much.
You can’t cut your way
out of a recession. That’s what Europe is trying to do, with dismal results.
The time to cut spending is when things are going good. Jobs or the lack of them
is the biggest problem right now.
Yet another
misconception is that the fallout from a failure to raise the debt limit would
not be that big a deal. It would be.
Shutting down the
government is a bad idea but somehow we’ll stagger through it out to the other
side. If we default on our debts, however, it would be a catastrophe that would
bring our economy to its knees and have ramifications that stretch far into the
future.
You don’t mess with
something like that. You don’t try to make it into a bargaining chip. You spent
the money and now it’s time pay for what you bought. If that demands a higher
level of debt, so be it.
President Barack Obama
is right to refuse to even consider giving in to the threats of the House
Republicans. If he were to bargain on the debt ceiling, he would leave
himself and the nation open to continued blackmail.
What I really don’t
understand is why normal, sensible Republicans — conservative but reasonable —
are allowing their party to be taken over by a gang of lame-brained thugs.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org