Mitch McConnell Blinked FirstFollow

Now they should just lower taxes and really drive that heel into the economy.

Indeed.

What bothers me about the whole "no higher taxes" thing that the Republicans keep chanting is that they're only telling a skewed half of the story, and stupid people (like varus) fall for it.

You've got some moron out there, and he hears McConnell ranting that Obama wants to "raise taxes" and insisting that the Republicans won't let him. So the moron says, "Why, Obama wants to take more of my $1,500 a year in taxes?! Hell no! The Republicans are looking out for me!"



And then you have people like gbaji who want us to believe that companies won't create more jobs if we tax the ultra-rich more on their personal taxes.

You use that word a lot, yet have no idea what it means.

I thought the story was that that's what he's been doing the last 6 weeks already.

Ya he just needs to stop paying Vets and other such services to American service personnel.

One could argue and counter-argue a lot of things but that's not really relevant to the validity of the Aug 2 date.

Adorable.

That's pretty dense, Virus. Even for you.

Well, there's these "liberal economists" (PDF) who think that:

Sadly, there's only one page of letter in that PDF as the other eighteen pages are being taken up by signatories.

The first problem is that many people (mostly liberals and unfortunately some conservatives who repeat the straw man) are equating "not increasing the debt ceiling" with "defaulting on our debt".

Those are not the same thing. Obviously, defaulting on our debt would be bad and we should avoid it at all costs. What's really at stake is how we go about doing that. If we raise the debt ceiling, then we avoid defaulting on our debt by just borrowing more money. If we don't raise the debt ceiling, then we have to avoid defaulting on our debt by cutting spending.


Which is what conservatives want us to do. Hence, why there isn't a whole lot of angst about not raising the debt ceiling on the right and *also* why there's a whole lot of hyperbole about defaulting on debt, and not being able to cut Social Security and Medicare checks coming from the left.

It's all silliness and posturing anyhow. If we don't up the debt ceiling, the most likely result would be that congress would pass an accounting bill to zero out a trillion or so in intergovernmental debt, which would give us breathing room and time to work out how to cut non-critical spending in order to bring out budget into line. The left doesn't want to do this, not because they're afraid for medicare and social security recipients, but because they want to protect spending on things like green energy, and subsidies for electric cars, and public radio, and carbon sequestration boondoggles, and funding for social services organizations like ACORN, and welfare checks for crack addicts, and thousands of other things that they constantly pump federal tax dollars into but that aren't really needed.

They don't want the American people to have to make a choice between social security and electric cars. Because they know what the answer will be and they won't like it. It's as simple as that.