The Joke's on America

Hooray! No default! Great news! Victory lap! They agreed!

It is encouraging that America will not default on our loans, although by encouraging I mean it's an embarrassment that we ever go to this point to begin with.  Still the deal is bad and reflects the foolishness of the Tea Party as well as their power. 

The lessons of history as well as every economic textbook tell us that when the economy is depressed we should spend to put people back to work.  Certainly Republicans are right when they say we can raise revenue without raising taxes by putting people back to work.  But we need to create jobs and cutting spending right now does not create jobs.  In fact, it will probably be a detriment to economic growth.

So yeah, we got a deal, a raw deal.  The joke is on America.  The Tea Party took a non-issue and made it an issue.  Had we focused on economic recovery and created jobs, the deficit issue would have partially mitigated itself and would have become much easier to solve.  Instead we are cutting spending at the wrong time because a group of 70 idiots held the government hostage.  Of course, everyone else in said government deserves blame as well.  The let the Tea Party hijack the debate.  They played along with the shenanigans and bad ideas and now we are worse off for it.

We negotiated with the hostage-takers and so we empowered them.  It's appalling but we did it.  We can hope that at least a few months of certainty will lead to some growth, but in all likelihood the cuts will be more damaging that the sense of relief that America will not default. 

Now we can only hope that we have done enough to relieve the threat of a credit downgrade although the gridlock in Washington means that we are probably facing another such warning in a few months.  The Tea Party has not only damaged our economy but made us a laughingstock in the eyes of the world.  In Athens people are rioting over forced austerity and default but we brought ourselves to the brink willingly.  Next time China proposes the creation of a new reserve currency to replace the dollar, how much weight will American protests carry?  Will we still set the international agenda?  Will all of our talk of austerity and belt-tightening at home lead other nations to eschew their international responsibilities as our rhetoric leads me to believe we will? 

Yes, we got a debt-ceiling deal but it cost us the chance to fix our economy and it undermined our position as the world's leader.  The joke is on us, America, and we can thank the idiots who parade around dressed like they belong in Colonial Williamsburg for the predicament we find ourselves in.