The Nature of Things

One of the most maddening things about this whole interminable and wholly unnecessary squabble about raising the debt ceiling has been the mainstream media's insistence on a false equivalency of the two sides. When covering the story, they will invariably insist that both Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for the debacle, the inability of the government to function.  This is categorically untrue, and so-called journalists do a great disservice to the country and betray their professional ethics when they choose to report the story in that way. In fact, the debt ceiling crisis has been entirely manufactured by the tea party-led Republicans whose goal is quite simply to destroy government, to do away with all regulation, oversight, consumer and public health protections, and with the social safety net that has made life more comfortable for the poor and for the middle class.  Their constituents are not the poor and the middle class.  Their constituents are the...

Are you as sick of hearing about the debt ceiling as I am?  I mean, it is not like the debt ceiling is anything new.  We've been dealing with it for years and years.  Every year Congress puts a budget in place and then, when they inevitably realize there isn't money to cover the budget they've installed, they raise the debt ceiling so that the country can borrow money to meet its obligations.  And that is the cogent point here:  Raising the debt ceiling allows us to meet our obligations, i.e., debts we've already incurred.  It doesn't allow us to spend more money.  Only Congress, which controls the country's purse strings, can do that with a new budget. In the past, when there were fewer crazy people in Congress, raising the debt ceiling was simply a matter of housekeeping.  It was accomplished as needed with a minimum of fuss.  But nothing with this Congress gets accomplished with a minimum of fuss.  ( In fact, very little gets accompli...