The game of chicken played by Democrats and Republicans over the federal budget and raising the debt ceiling, with talk about credit rating agencies downgrading U.S. debt, not only throws America’s credibility as a borrower into doubt, but darkens its credibility as a global leader and whether it can be trusted anymore.
It’s easy to cut the deficit and restore a balanced budget. Just do what the Bowles-Simpson report says, for starters. Start listening to the taxpayers who paid for the report and stop ignoring We the Maids who must repeatedly clean up career politicians mess while they choose to ignore us and just take care of themselves and their financial family and enterprises, usually both.
Why should career politicians in Washington care if their headstrong extreme political stubbornness shuts down the government. They still get their paychecks. They made sure of that first. It’s the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who won’t get theirs, or the suppliers and vendors that provide what the government needs to function to serve the people. The taxpayers and Social Security recipients, who already paid their fair share of taxes to support and receive basic benefits, will be denied their basic services, including enrolling sick people into life- saving medical trials, answering medical hot lines, cleaning up toxic waste or processing passport applications.
As the satirist Andy Borowitz wrote in a Twitter message: “That’s like eliminating the fire department and sending checks to arsonists.”
For the U.S. government to even utter those thoughts, when it knows the consequences of the 1995 shutdown and what that did to America and its image, is a disgrace. It is a disrespectful act that the Founding Fathers would consider tantamount to treason. After all, isn’t that what King George and the British traders did that caused the Founding Fathers to rebel?
The reason the debt ceiling was routinely raised before the 2011 impasse is because the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the universal understanding that U.S. Treasury bills are the safest investment on earth are key attributes of American power ─ as important, if not more so to the U.S. role in the world as military power.
For the Tea Party and the Republicans to hold America’s “full faith and credit” hostage to the partisan gridlock in Washington is inexcusable, destructive ignorance and un-American.
Photo Courtesy: Flickr bmills http://www.flickr.com/photos/32485328@N00/