So it seems like the debt ceiling will be raised. Not to worry, though, there are several more rounds of this drama awaiting us:
- We get not one, but two more debt ceiling votes in the immediate future, like Republicans wanted.
- The McConnell notion of a future debt vote in which the president can get a small partial raising of the debt limit if he agrees it’s all on his own head, upon which Congress gets to have a meaningless “no” vote to wash its hands of it.
- But that’s not good enough, so we also include the formation of Super Congress! It’s a Republican-desired committee tasked with making up to $1.5 trillion in budget cuts, so that Congress doesn’t have to do the dirty work itself. Then Congress gets to vote on whether to adopt those cuts…
- … and we get the Republican demand of a “trigger,” because if those committee-proposed cuts get voted down by Congress, presuming the committee can even produce recommendations in the first place (the last one couldn’t), we get cuts anyway, in the form of mandatory across-the-board cuts of as much as $1.5 trillion.
- As the GOP insisted, there are no new revenues. No tax increases.
If the Democrats were going to roll over and play dead anyways, then what was the point of the whole drama, I wonder?
I’m getting a sinking feeling we are never going to get out of this whole mess.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m getting a sinking feeling we are never going to get out of this whole mess.
I have the same feeling. The only hope is that the voters will evict the crazies next year. But the Democrats are only slightly better, niestety.
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BTW, Clarissa, is it possible for you to alter slightly the format here so that one does not need to scroll back to the top of a post after reading it in order to click on the button to either read or post comments? This is one thing that was much quicker and easier on blogspot.
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This cannot be done without switching to a completely different template. I hate this structure, too, when I come across it on other blogs.
There are many other templates but if I start switching them so often, people will have trouble getting used to it.
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Can you import your own templates ?
Because if you could and if you wanted, I could try and modify this template so these buttons would be displayed at the bottom of the page too.
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I won’t be able to do that unless I move to a self-hosted wordpress. org blog. I think I will do that in about two years or so. WordPress. com doesn’t allow one to modify the template in any way.
Thank you for the offer, though!
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The US economy is going down…..
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That is weird. I inserted a Polish word into my comment above. I usually only do that when I am attempting to speak Spanish; I don’t think I have ever done it in writing before, and I am not even sure I spelled it correctly. It does make me wonder how someone such as you keeps so many languages straight and separate!
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Oh, I was wondering what that was. 🙂 What does it mean?
I sometimes don’t manage to keep them apart. I’m terrified of bats and while I was walking with my husband around the neighborhood we saw two bats. So I cried out, “Murciélago, murciélago.” Of course, he didn’t understand because he doesn’t t speak Spanish. I also sometimes address him in Spanish when I’m deep in thought. 🙂
And a couple of times, I started speaking in Russian to my students. It went over fine because they thought I was using some obscure Spanish words. 🙂 🙂
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“Niestety” is Polish and means “unfortunately” although I am not certain I spelled it correctly.
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I just found it, and you spelled it perfectly: http://en.bab.la/dictionary/polish-english/niestety
We have many words borrowed from Polish in Ukrainian but not this one.
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Clarissa:
You may well be right. The US fiscal hole is so deep that any way out will be more painful than a people who have become used to the soft life will accept. In addition to the published debt of $14 trillion and rising, there is an unpublished debt reflected in the present value of future off-budget obligations by the US government that amounts to some $60 trillion. If there has been such pain in taking down just $2 trillion over ten years, how much pain will there be when they head after the remaining $72 trillion!
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There has to be a way out, though. This is a rich country that doesn’t have to find itself in such a dire situation, I believe.
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Military spending: http://ctj.org/ctjinthenews/2011/07/counter_punch_debt_ceiling_dumbshow_lots_of_posturing_no_solutions.php
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