Disaster Looming

Here is a surprise for you: Republicans are uncooperative and determined to ruin America...what a revelation.  The latest chapter in their new book "How to ruin a nation" was written yesterday as John Boehner pulled out of talks with President Obama AGAIN saying that a deal was never reached because he and the president have "different visions for our country."

John's right; Democrats and Republicans have different visions for the country.  One of those visions involves avoiding default, the other involves wrecking the world economy, tainting the honor of America and ending the age of American hegemony through self-imposed default.  Can you imagine what people in some of the Euro-zone countries who have been forced into default and are suffering mightily right now must be thinking?  How embarrassing.  We may default not because we cannot pay but because we will not.

While I still maintain hope that a deal will get done, I agree with President Obama that real governing is going to be impossible as long as one house of Congress is being run by 70 morons drinking tea.  Even if we raise the debt ceiling then what?  Until the next election no one in government will legislate, everyone will campaign.  The impasse on the debt ceiling is a symptom of the broader problem that one of the two parties is not interested in responsibility or the future of America - they are interested in saying no to the president and getting themselves reelected, America's credit rating be damned!

This dramatic debacle has been going on long enough and there isn't much else to be said at this point.  I'm optimistic for a deal, but truthfully, it will be a bad one even if Republicans are willing to compromise.  We need entitlement reform, but the Tea Party is swinging Paul Bunyan's axe with a blindfold on and failing to address the issue - the rising cost of healthcare.  Of course, we don't know how successful Obamacare will be in fixing that issue.

And no amount of entitlement reform is going to fix our broken economy.  Politicians, it seems, have forgotten that we are in a recession.  Companies aren't hiring because no one is buying but rather than focusing on unemployment, the president has let Republicans hijack the debate and focus on spending, a problem to be sure, but a secondary one.  Even if we get a deal to raise the debt limit we are focusing on the wrong issue.  This is probably part of the grand Republican scheme to make sure Obama isn't reelected, but the Republican party is run by the Tea Party these days and those people are fools so I'm not convinced that they've really through the political implications of their actions.

A brief default - if in name only - seems increasingly likely and will probably be nothing more than a wake-up call to Washington, but if the Tea Party is as set in their ways as it seems they are then we really could be looking at disaster for the world economy and we would have no one to blame but ourselves or rather the handful of people who put their ideology over the well-being of their country.