We haven't, until today, riffed at all on the faux Hatfield-McCoy battles of the Debt Ceiling debacle.
The Dems blew their chances for this to be a no-brainer last year, when they held all the cards.
The Party of Noicans want us all to fight over potato rations and dirty rain water, unless they get what they want, which is an end to Medicare and Social Security.
Lassie's friend, Little Timmy, is warning the sky is falling.
Krugman is standing on a chair, screaming at the top of his lungs, but nobody in Congress or the White House is listening.
Mommy Moose is threatening The Crying Man that she'll kick his ass (and knock out all his teeth for mumbling about it) if he caves to the Dems.
So it took Matthew Yglesias today to give a proverbial "head slap" to everybody:
Surveying the scene, perhaps everyone should take a deep breath and recall the traditional way the country has avoided default when the debt ceiling needs raising: Congress raises the debt ceiling.
It’s that simple. The same kind of “clean” debt ceiling increase that’s passed repeatedly over the past 100 years will allow the country to avoid default without tax increases, without defense cuts, and without slashing entitlement spending. Education will be spared. So will transportation, health care, farm subsidies, and everything else. The interest rates investors are charging the American government to buy our debt are extremely low right now. The world economy is suffering from an excessive demand for American debt, not by reluctance to lend. All we need to do to keep our finances flowing is to raise the statutory debt ceiling. At some point, things will change, and we may face a crisis that requires bipartisan dealmaking and “tough choices.” Right now, though, the only crisis we face is an entirely self-created one. House Republicans wanted to create a hostage situation to force President Obama to propose steep spending cuts. But when Obama came to the table with a proposal for steep cuts, it turned out that Republicans don’t actually want to sign a bipartisan deal. Which is fine. Don’t sign a deal! The absence of a deal in no way forces a crisis. Just raise the debt ceiling, fight the 2012 elections, and pick up the long-term budget issue then.
The world has plenty of problems on its plate right now. The long-term U.S. structural deficit isn’t one of them. The expiration of the Treasury Department’s borrowing authority is one. And the latter problem can be solved without addressing the former.
Naw, that's too easy...
The new date now is August 2nd for the Economic Meteor to make its fiery crash, which means we have nearly three weeks for all this bullshit to continue before either Obama gives us more of that Hope & Change and the Dems cave to the Party of Noicans, or somebody pulls up Yglesias' post and the lapdog media can go back to covering The Wasilla Whiz Kid (who, along with boasting she can kick anyone's ass in an election, is aghast now over the price of Slim Jims).
Let's hope we don't have to bring Joe Gideon out for a curtain call.
Bye Bye Life - "All That Jazz" (1979)
(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)