It’s debt ceiling day, the day the U.S. Department of Treasury projects the nation will reach the $31.4 trillion cap on the nation’s borrowing and will have to begin implementing extraordinary measures to avoid a default. Secretary Janet Yellen informed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy Thursday morning that it will “suspend additional investments of amounts credited to, and redeem a portion of the investments held by” the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund. (Those funds will be repaid when the situation is resolution—no retiree will be affected now.)
That explanation sounds dry and benign. That’s certainly how Josh Boak at the Associated Press approaches it in his “explainer” about the situation. These measures are “a bunch of accounting workarounds,” Boak says. “Yes, accounting.” He adds that “there have been roughly 80 deals to raise or suspend the borrowing cap since the 1960s.”
That’s all true. In normal times, the Treasury shuffles the money around to make sure everything is covered if we even reached the limit. In normal times, a rational Congress would have either set a new limit on borrowing or suspended to cap to some future date to make sure that the government could continue to function, make debt payments, and not explode the national and global economies. But that’s before nihilistic domestic terrorists took over the GOP and started threatening to to do just that: Blow it all up. And this is where Boak, and others in the traditional media, massively fail.
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Boak acknowledges a default “could lead to a global financial crisis.” It’s where he pretends like this is just another partisan fight that’s the problem. “So far, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Biden are playing what could be a dangerous game of chicken with the world’s largest economy in the middle.” That’s some major league both-sidesing right there.
It’s of course not just the Associated Press. Check out this framing in a tweet from The New York Times: “The U.S. has hit its debt limit, raising economic fears and setting the stage for months of entrenched partisan warfare.” Partisan warfare, of course. Inside the story, the reporters take pains to insist that “the country’s $31.4 trillion debt cap is the product of decades of tax cuts and increased government spending by both Republicans and Democrats.”
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport don’t then explain that the House GOP actually plans to allow the country to go into default for the first time since 1917 when the debt ceiling was created in order to force massive domestic spending cuts. Instead they intone that “a moment of heightened partisanship and divided government, it is also a warning of the entrenched partisan battles that are set to dominate Washington in the months to come, and that could end in economic shock.”
Democrats, the pair write, “have solidified in their position that negotiations over the debt limit only enhance the risks of economic calamity by encouraging Republicans to use it as leverage,” while Republicans “emboldened by anger among their base and conservative advocacy groups over failures in the past to exact concessions for raising the limit, have pledged not to let that happen again.” But really, it’s—all together now—both sides! “In reality, both parties have approved policies that fueled the growth in government borrowing.”
Landing us, they say, in yet another “entrenched partisan battle.” Like that’s totally normal, right? It’s not. This could have been avoided, would have been avoided, if the GOP were a functioning, responsible opposition party interested in actual governance.
This is entirely the product of a GOP that decided taking hostages was a lot easier than legislating. It’s a maximalist approach in keeping with their vision for minority rule: Do whatever it takes to simply shut Democrats out of governing. If it means damaging the economy—which even the threat of a default will do—so be it.
Because they know that the traditional media has been completely played by them and will both-sides the wreckage.
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