Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama is a real piece of work. He writes today in the Washington Post Editorial page today and boy oh boy it is great example of the epistemic closer that has infested the Republican Party and the Conservative Right. He starts out with the warning of dire consequences of our high debt and deficit spending and he lays the fault completely at the feet of President Obama.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
He tells a little story about the 2008 financial collapse when the Republican Secretary of the Treasury said that he had the housing bubble under control, then a few months later came to Congress and said "we have not in our lifetimes dealt with a financial crisis of this severity". All that is probably true, but given that it ignores the fact that it was the Republicans deregulation of banking (tragically with the signature of President Clinton) and the Bush administrations insistence that the market would take care of itself that lead to the collapse. Given that, this warning seems a little hollow to me.
Then Sen. Sessions engages in a little through the rabbit hole thinking about the tax deal last month. He says:
Last month, President Obama would agree to maintain current tax rates only if Congress would agree to increase federal deficit spending. We are headed toward a cliff, yet the president hits the accelerator.
Talk about mendacious! Did you see what he is saying there? Republicans really, really, really care about the debt but that mean old President Obama would only let them spend 700 billion over ten years in tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires if we didn’t cut spending for things like education and unemployment benefits!
Is you brain aching from the cognitive dissonance yet? If not, wait, it is early. It would be one thing if Sen. Sessions (R –La La Land) were just some new Tea Party candidate who found themselves elevated to the Senate, but the sad truth is that he is the Ranking Republican (and that is pretty rank) on the Senate Budget Committee. He is expected to know how things actually work and be, you know, adult about the problems facing the nation in terms of revenue and spending, debt and economic development.
Instead he is acting like a child who insists to their babysitter that he can have candy before bed, he always has before. I will give Sen. Sessions this, he does not complain about a problem without offering a solution, but his solution is, well insane.
He says in his OpEd:
To begin turning the corner, I propose that any effort to raise the debt ceiling be tied to no less than a sustained 10 percent reduction of current discretionary spending. Though this is only a first step, it would finally be a step in the right direction - one the country can easily absorb.
It is hard for this blogger to know where to start with something like that. First off this is hostage taking plan and simple. Sen. Sessions is saying that he thinks there should not be a raise in the debt ceiling if we don’t enact a 10% cut in discretionary spending, as a start!
Failure to raise our debt ceiling would be a huge freaking disaster for this nation, and the world. It would be a signal to the world that the United States was not going to honor its debts and that the trillions of dollars in U.S. bonds now held by, well, everyone could not be accurately valued. It would likely cause a huge sell off of our debt and a massive inability to sell new debt to fund our nation. It would call into question the very nature of our money, which is the de facto world currency. At best there would be another and deeper financial crash, at worst whole nations could collapse as the monetary system takes a hit to the central pillar of world finance, the U.S. dollar.
That is one bit of craziness. The other is the fact that while we are in a rescission where millions of people are out of work for long periods of time, cutting spending by 10% is not a good idea. The only major source of demand right now is coming from government spending. To cut that back means that lots and lots of people who have jobs today would be in danger of losing them. Folks like teachers and fire fighters and cops who are still on the job because of aid to the States. I will give Sen. Sessions this much credit, he is not one of the Republicans who is talking about keeping defense spending off the table, but the fact of the matter is that he can go out on a limb like that, because he knows his colleges in the House won’t let the Holy Grail of defense spending be cut. So it is an empty gesture designed to make him look more reasonable (and the FSM knows he needs a lot of help in that area!).
He tries to bolster his case with another example, it is too bad it is once again a black is white, up is down example that could only sound reasonable inside the Republican information bubble. He says:
As we enter the annual budget season, Washington will need to consider the kind of change this country has not accomplished since 1997 - when a strong Republican Congress passed a budget that converted soaring deficits into surpluses.
This is pretty laughable on a couple of levels. First off it completely misses the fact that President Clinton raised taxes in 1993 setting the stage for the Federal Government to have more money to invest in growth. It is also pretty risible that it was a "strong Republican Congress" given that they were the ones that lost the government shut down in 1995, and some modest gains by Democrats in the election of 1996.
Just as some Republicans are trying to take credit for the positive economic signs over the last couple of months, Sen. Sessions is trying to act as though the Republican Congress in the 1990’s did not do everything they could to resist the efforts of then Democratic President to put the country on a sound economic footing. The best example to counter Sen. Sessions assertions is that as soon as there was a Republican President that surplus turned into the very massive debt and deficit that he is railing against, and it was completely Republican dominated Congress that went along with the spending and tax cutting.
All this goes to show what we already know; no one should take Republicans seriously when they talk about being fiscally responsible. As long as they are defending tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy they can not credibly talk about the deficit. But the Washington Post, Wall St. Journal and Fox News will continue to treat them like they are serious, instead of kids pouting for candy before bed.
The floor is yours.