| I was reading this Web chathosted by the Washington Post with a former Reagan adviser, and laughing because it's one of the funniest things I've read in a long time and because it involves government debt and credit and interest rates, which usually makes for reading that is about as light as the Edmund Fitzgerald, pre-Gale of November. Here's an exchange as illustration. Reagan and the Right Given that no less a luminary on the right than Ronald Reagan has spoken of the dangers about failing to raise the debt, why have conservatives forced us down the very dangerous road we're currently on? Bruce Bartlett: They are not driven by rational analysis, but by right wing dogma.
Basically, as he lays it out, failure to raise the debt ceiling will force the president to make choices about what to pay ... either he can pay entitlement obligations like Social Security and Medicare, or he can pay other bills, or he can pay interest on the national debt. That's just swell with Nolan Finley. Rapture predictor Harold Camping and President Barack Obama have much in common: Both preach a date-certain apocalypse, panicking those foolish enough to believe them.
This isn't the first time that Finley has compared people to born again evangelical Christians who believe in the Rapture (and most of whom are politically very conservative). He did it a few months ago with climate change, too. Later, by the way, he writes this: Of course, if the president and his team don't stop demagoguing about the debt ceiling, ... .
This is Finley's stock-in-trade, accusing others of demogoguing right after doing it himself. But, what about the debt ceiling? Washington could choose to keep paying unemployment benefits ($12.8 billion), keep paying its soldiers ($2.9 billion) and keep up the salaries of the one-third of the federal work force deemed essential ($4.5 billion) and still have about $24 billion left for any other programs it considers vital.
You see what he's advocating here? Money would still roll into the Treasury, and enough to temporarily hold off creditors and pay most bills. What bills would be left over? Programs authorized by Congress and signed by the president. In other words, programs authorized by law. Nolan Finley is not only saying that the credit rating agencies are full of shit when they warn about interest rate hikes for not raising the debt ceiling, but he is saying that while risking this that the president ought to at the same time break federal laws. |
