As we enter budget negotiations in this post-shutdown, post default-crisis moment, I thought it would be helpful to discuss what led to is in the first place. The debt ceiling and the government shutdown are two separate issues, but the crisis did demonstrate that they have a link. The link, I propose, is that the Right in our political culture operates out of faith and not facts. Since they "believe" they are right, they can advocate positions that are demonstrably false, (We have too much government, so we can shut it down without causing pain: If we only pay the interest on our bonds, we don't default.)
Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)went on many talk shows to say how the shutdown would show us that, indeed we have too much government. As a result of the shutdown, it seems that everyday, the Republican held House of Representatives was passing legislation to fund something popular that they suddenly discovered government did.
These same people that are discovering all the things government is doing in their districts, also believe that we can pick and choose which bills we need to pay. I won't belabor the fact that they harp on the Federal government not picking winners and losers, and move on to their kitchen table argument about a family paying its bills. They (Republicans) favor credit card companies raising my interest rates if I miss a payment to a third party. They think credit markets will exempt the government from those rules?
Here is the simple fact. As you may have heard, we are a nation of laws. In practical terms, every dollar we spend, we spend by an act of law. Passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President. The debt ceiling also has the force of law. We often authorize the spending of money we do not have. At the same time, we need to pass a new law to authorize the borrowing of money to pay bills we lawfully accrued.
But why are we here? The Right tells us that by the end of President Obama's second term, he will have run up more debt than all previous Presidents combined. Maybe, maybe not. When he took office, the debt was over $10 trillion. Let's look at that. For starters, if spending more that all of your predecessors is a measurement, then Reagan was the worst. He came into office with under $1 trillion, and left with just under $3 trillion. In other words, He increased the deficit by more than twofold to all his predecessors combined.
The debt continued to grow under President George H. W. Bush, and did not recede until President Clinton, who actually oversaw an annual budget surplus. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before Congress as to the dangers of paying off our debt too quickly to support President George W Bush's tax cuts. By the way, the reason his tax cuts had sunset provisions was to hide the long range costs.
As we turned from surplus back to deficit under Bush 43, Vice President Cheney told us that deficits don't matter. Now we have a debt crisis? I'm going with- NO. Let's recap. The same president cut the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 28% raised payroll taxes which happen to be capped and therefore affect the poor and middle class more than the wealthy. Now we need to cut the benefits of Social Security recipients rather than subject the wealthy to an equal tax burden.
Oh, and by the way, the top 4 expenditures on our balance sheet each year are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, and Debt service. In other words, one of the biggest things President Obama has spent money on is the debt run up before he ever got into office, including the near doubling of the debt that took place under his predecessor, who also left him with a train wreck of an economy.
Red states are often the top recipients of federal dollars per capita. In other words, they would be further in the red without federal help. We incur more debt under Red administrations than under blue. These are provable facts. That's why the ink is red.