The freshmen GOPers from the Tea Party wing of the radical right are close to causing an economic catastrophe because of their ideological fixation on reducing the size of government. Note that it is a fixation on size per se--not on whether this or that program is a good one that is important to the American people. They want to cut spending no matter who it hurts. Maybe, like Pete Peterson, the billionaire who wants to break the New Deal Social Security and Medicare programs, they think that an elderly widow living alone on less than $15,000 a year in Social Security is 'enjoying a taxpayer subsidized retirement vacation' (to paraphrase a recent Peterson snide remark on the subject). And they refuse to raise taxes on the rich and big multinational corporations, even though the rich did quite fine even when they paid more in taxes and even though having the rich pay more in taxes is beneficial for democracy.
These Tea Party radicals are like all other fundamentalists. They have adopted an absolutist view of the world (that doesn't actually match the factual reality of the world or even the factual reality of the capitalist market system that they claim to foster). That absolutist view has become an ingrained belief for them. No facts can dislodge it. No logic can deal with it. And accordingly, no description of the havoc they are creating will dissuade them from continuing to create havoc.
So what's the solution? Obama and the Democrats would be fools to sacrifice the social justice programs on the alter of the radical right's dogmatic beliefs that they can and should set an arbitrary number for debt and spending that has no relation to real needs or real priorities. So Big Business had better get busy, because it will be the biggest loser if these tea party radicals don't buckle under. Why? Because the US debt rating downgrade will result in higher interest paid on the US debt, leading to greater debt service needs and lower liquidity for business. Business won't enjoy those nice comfortable spreads they've been enjoying--their costs will go up and their profits will go down. Even Big Business knows that the debt ceiling has to be raised and should be raised without any strings attached, much as it wants the fundamentalists in the Tea Party to get it the tax-free pass it so heavily lobbies for (territorial taxation, zero taxation, freedom to engage in globalization at the expense of US workers when decent policies would extract serious taxes to pay for the harm done, etc.)
That is, somebody needs to educate this bunch on the way the world works. And the way the debt ceiling in the US works. Big Business is the one that matters to this bunch, not ordinary Americans. So the US Chamber and the National Association of Manufacturers and other business organizations had better get on the horn and tell those green behind the ears freshmen GOP House members that their naivete is rapidly leading them down the road to the destruction of the American Way of Life.
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