Following slight budget cuts and a stalemate on taxes, Standard and Poors has upgraded the outlook for United States debt from negative to stable.
Thank goodness for gridlock.
“The U.S. has a less than one-in-three likelihood of a downgrade in the ‘near term’ with the revision,” reports Bloomberg. “The New York-based company said it sees ‘tentative improvements,’ such as the deal politicians reached to resolve what became known as the fiscal cliff and through spending cuts in the Budget Control Act of 2011.”
Just think what good would happen if the president and Congress actually got together on something?
OK- Strike that.
We already know what would happen: Taxes would go up -as would spending- and America’s credit would be downgraded promptly.
(Dead White Male Photo from: VanishingNewYork)
Thank goodness for scandals.
They’ve been the best things to happen to the U.S. economy since Obama was elected.
Under Reagan we got a sudden jumpstart to the economy through less regulation, more individual choices, fewer top-down mandates. And whether through gridlock or scandal, hopefully we’re seeing some of that in the economy right now, as Washington turns it attention to blood lust and survival and away from bad execution of policies that were never designed to solve problems to begin with.
Let’s juxtapose this new, do-nothing government, which we have been enjoying the last few months, with the all-activist, all-the-time government that we’ve gotten from the Democrats since 2006.
“That's because, barring action by lawmakers, the cap on total defense and domestic ‘discretionary’ spending is set $19 billion lower for fiscal 2014,” reports CNN, “which begins Oct. 1. In other words, the magnitude of the 2013 cuts will be preserved and $19 billion more will need to be cut from the discretionary budget, which funds a vast number of government programs and agencies from national parks to the FBI.”
So let us all pray for congressional inaction.
To make them inert, Washington, DC will have to get busy with things that have nothing to do with passing legislation, appointing trade representatives, developing new urban renewal plans, or recognizing basic shapes and colors.
That’s easy to do.
Word has it that even more scandal is going to break, and that’s even before we’ve digested and come to terms with the, um, ten or twelve- I forgot the number exactly- scandals that have blown through the city like an Oklahoma tornado.
What were are seeing in the consequent juxtaposition is that Premiere Obama’s basic premise that in order for something to happen, government has to first start to do something, tax something or regulate something, is false.
“Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems,” Obama told us recently in a eulogy of his presidency. “Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted.”
And this, as Mark Twain would say, is where the music started.
Just think: Only a few short months ago Obama was dreaming of going Francois Hollande- that’s the president of France for any aspiring Al Frakens out there- on us, demanding even more taxes and spending because, well, that’s what Democrats do.
It doesn’t matter what the exact policy is, it just has to meet a few strict criteria of costing a ton, accomplishing nothing and requiring more legislation that they got wrong the first time.
And it has to be done in big, big hurry, 'cuz gosh, there’s not a moment to lose.
“As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos,” wrote one constitutional law professor in the New York Times, right before the first of the year, “observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.”
He called the framers of the constitution “a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves.”
Let me be the first to call that man a goober.
For the latter condition, there’s medication one can take. For the former, the constitution was written exactly to stop constitutional law professors and presidents from getting their way in a burst of hysteria that we must DO something.
But for now, let’s hope the DC standoff continues, as our constitution dictates. The economy could sure use a break, as we ourselves could too.
It’s kind of like someone planned it that way.
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