The Debt Deal Gives Us Only One Sure Thing: Uncertainty
This is what I’ve got on my score card: the debt ceiling deal that congress agreed to is, a) a deal that no one liked; b) that no one knows for sure what it contains; c) that took six months to fanagle; d) that was agreed to at the fiftieth minute of the eleventh hour; and that e) is the best we could have gotten.
Here’s what I don’t get. The folks that caused this political and economic anxiety spasm say they did it because our country must get it’s financial house in order. It’s the same reason they used to protest President Obama’s Heath Care plan – they said it caused uncertainty in the market because businesses and employers were paralyzed by not knowing what to expect. And yet, in the name of fiscal responsibility they shanghaied the process and caused uncertainty in the global market in order to get what they wanted: no tax increases for the wealthy, or shall I say private-plane-owning-job-creators.
It makes little sense, I know, but maybe we should all get used to it because it looks to be the new way of doing politics. It’s ugly, and the results are uglier still, but it’s what we voted for. And until the voters come to their senses and elect reasonable people that will fulfill a reasonable need, we’re gonna get more of the same.
That said, there are some things about what just happened in Washington that we need to consider. The most important is that, sadly, politics is no longer an art. The Tea Party, which holds one-third of one-third of the power in Washington, believes wholeheartedly that politics is a zero-sum game. This is entirely new. American politicians of all stripes and leanings have always understood the art of the compromise, where the gamesmanship was in squeezing more of what you wanted out of the process. So President Reagan and Tip O’neill could meet somewhere near the half-way line, as could President Clinton and Newt Gingrich. But these guys we have now, play an all-or-nothing gamble.
Another thing to consider is that we don’t know, yet, what the result will be. Aside from the fact that the debt ceiling was lifted and that there will be cuts in spending, we have no clue to follow. The legislation that lifted the debt ceiling also created a super committee that will meet to consider the budget deficit. You’d expect that every interested party in the country would be up in arms; from the elderly to the veterans to the parents of college students. And I don’t blame any of them. They don’t know what to expect from this super committee; American’s are used to the word as it defines fantasy heroes and obscenely large servings of french fries. Are we gonna get a repetition of what we just went through only twice as large and with too much sodium? These zero-sum tea Party people are good at creating uncertainty.
The idea behind this scheme seems to be that an economic crisis was averted and that the bartering of tax hikes and budget cuts was left for anther, more reasonable, day. And that would make clean sense if there really were a crisis and we were dealing with reasonable people. But this thing we avoided was only the threat of a crisis where there had never been one before, we’ve lifted the debt ceiling many times with no problems; this almost-crisis was entirely of our choosing. And the people we’re counting on to negotiate in the super committee are the same people who created the almost-crisis to begin with.
President Obama got what he wanted, sorta. He didn’t want the debt ceiling and the budget fight kicked down the road where it would interfere with elections or the Christmas buying season. So he agreed to kick the budget fight farther than the election in order to lift the debt limit and pay the nation’s bills now.
What you’re going to hear between now and then is a whole lot of hollering. Every group and interest that feels the uncertainty of the super budget knife is going to circle their wagons and make lots of noise because that’s what you do when you want to spook what you don’t know is out there.
The only thing you get when you mix a last minute political deal that no one wanted with a new paradigm of zero-sum politics is super-sized uncertainty.
Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda
[Photo by Rob Crawley]
