The fanatical cluelessness of the Tea Party Republicans have now placed our country in the company of Nazi Germany.
Reneging on its debt obligations would make the U.S. the first major Western government to default since Nazi Germany 80 years ago.
Germany unilaterally ceased payments on long-term borrowings on May 6, 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler was installed as Chancellor. The default helped cement Hitler’s power base following years of political instability as the Weimar Republic struggled with its crushing debts.
Of course the U.S. is not beset with "crushing debts," but rather, with crushing idiocy,
courtesy of
clowns like this who are more interested in preening themselves for quixotic Presidential fantasies than paying attention to the devastating human consequences of a default:
Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday that Republicans [should make] raising the Social Security retirement a condition of raising the debt ceiling, adding a new twist to the high-wire negotiations over re-opening the federal government and avoiding default.
“I am worried about a government that borrows over a million dollars every minute. And so I think there needs to be some structural reform of our spending or we shouldn’t raise the debt ceiling,” Paul told WABC’s Aaron Klein in an interview airing Sunday night, and shared with BuzzFeed. “And rising the age on social security gradually a couple months a year for younger people is a way to fix the imbalance. It ought to be done probably for Social Security and for Medicare.”
Sure, Rand. And when we have to lift it again next year we'll raise the eligibility age again for those programs, and again, and again, just to satisfy your bizarre Libertarian vision of what the country ought to look like. Pretty soon people won't get Social Security or Medicare until two years after they're dead. But in the interim, on the remote chance that the Democratic Party would disagree with your ideas, that would make us "serial defaulters," and again, the comparison with the Third Reich is relevant, by Godwin:
Serial Defaulter
Germany, staggering under the weight of 132 billion gold marks in war reparations and not permitted to export to the victors' markets, was a serial defaulter from 1922, according to Albrecht Ritschl, a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics. That forced the country to borrow to pay its creditors, in what Ritschl calls a Ponzi scheme.
"Reparations were at the heart of the issue in the interwar years," Ritschl said in a telephone interview. "The big question is why anyone lent a dime to Germany with those hanging over them. The assumption must have been that reparations would eventually go away."
Likewise, I guess the "big question" would be why anyone would want to lend to us after you and your Tea Party friends in Congress trash the world economy:
Failure by the world’s biggest economy to pay its debt in an interconnected, globalized world risks an array of devastating consequences that could lay waste to stock markets from Brazil to Zurich and bring the $5 trillion market in Treasury-backed loans to a halt. Borrowing costs would soar, the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency would be in doubt and the U.S. and world economies would risk plunging into recession -- and potentially depression.
Why is it you want to re-open the World War II memorial, again?