A Not-So-Looming Crisis

For year now, literally for four years, we have been hearing about the impending debt crisis facing America. The crisis that would send interest rates skyrocketing and bring the economy to its knees. We were baptized in the gospel of austerity despite the fact that we could see how miserably austerity was failing just across the pond; that response to the economic downturn being the very reason Europe's economy continued to sink while ours began to recover. Evidence, data, and historical fact were cast aside and ideology took its place atop the altar of American politics. Fortunately there were enough reasonable people to prevent austerity from taking hold in America, but there were and continue to be enough fools so that smart policies were never enacted.

Recently the fools have been on a little bit of a retreat, but only just a little bit of one. The rhetoric has changed slightly. Given its absence to materialize over the last four years, it would make sense to shelve the idea of the debt crisis, but no. Not unlike the rapture, the failure of the debt crisis to materialize reflects a failure of timing, not a failure of analysis, a 'we had it right all along, we just flubbed the date," kind of explanation. Just two weeks ago, good ole John Boehner, a man whose heart - I believe - is in the right place, but who has the intellect of an infant, concluded that the debt crisis is not in fact immediate, but looming. This represents a complete 180 in Boehner's thinking, but makes perfect sense given that something that has been immediate for four years but never materialized is, by definition, not immediate.

The real question, then, is whether or not this epiphany will lead the Republican party to come to some sensible conclusions about how to balance short-term spending on infrastructure and job creation with long-term curbs on entitlement spending. In fact we do need to find ways to balance smart spending cuts with revenue hikes that will neither diminish purchasing power nor stunt job creation. If there is a looming debt crisis, it is way down the road, but we need to address it now with measures that will put Americans back to work and lay the foundation for future success by helping us create a 21st century infrastructure. So are we going to get some sort of bargain on taxes and spending that will achieve these ends? Unlikely. Though the president has not unveiled his budget yet, he is already under attack, and both sides of the political spectrum deserve criticism for their criticism. Republicans are unsurprisingly unwavering in their opposition to any kind of new revenue, sticking to their misguided, outdated mantra about taxes being antithetical to economic growth. It's an intellectually trite position, but Republicans have spent too much time owning it to bother reevaluating. Democrats for their part attacked the President's plan to cut spending on entitlement programs even though such cuts are as yet unspecified and necessary for the future of the programs. The Democratic argument is also intellectually boring, but at least it's not cruel. If given the binary option of Robin Hood vs. Robin-Hood-in-Reverse, I'd choose Robin Hood, but of course neither plan is a good one; both fail to acknowledge a changing world. We should take away all of Congress's technology and force them to work with quill and ink since apparently they still live in days gone by.

If four years worth of evidence isn't enough for us to self-correct failed policy and this month's stagnant jobs report isn't evidence that we need to try something new, I don't know what it will take to force our Byzantine political machinery to begin operating properly. Americans deserve intelligent, proactive politicians, the kind who can acknowledge that when they forecast rain and it doesn't come that they should probably stop yelling for umbrellas.