House of Eratosthenes

Turning right with a vengeance, Republicans will bring to the House floor Tuesday a newly revised debt-ceiling bill that is remarkable for its total absence of compromise at this late date, two weeks before the threat of default.

Final revisions made Friday submerge conservative demands to reduce all federal spending to 18 percent of gross domestic product — a target that threatened to split the GOP by requiring far deeper cuts than even the party’s April budget. But Republican congressional leaders still want a 10-year, $1.8 trillion cut from nondefense appropriations and have added a balanced-budget constitutional amendment that so restricts future tax legislation that even President Ronald Reagan might have opposed it in the 1980s. [emphasis mine]

Ah, yes. WWRD? was just at the front of my lobes. That’s the question that really matters, right? Channel the spirit of our departed 40th President, and all will be well. That’s the common sense thing to do!

No, it isn’t. It is something the democrats have figured out might help their cause and so we get to hear about it over and over again. Et tu, Politico?

As a budget compromise between the parties remains elusive, Democrats are turning to a conservative icon to guide the way to a debt-ceiling increase.

President Obama and Democrats in Congress have begun pointing out that President Ronald Reagan pushed to raise the debt ceiling nearly twenty times during his presidency.

“Ronald Reagan worked with [Democratic Speaker] Tip O’Neill and Democrats to cut spending, raise revenues and reform Social Security,” Obama said Saturday in his weekly address, noting that “that kind of cooperation should be the least you expect from us.”

In press conferences, floor speeches, and interviews recently, Democrats have cited Reagan’s support for raising the debt ceiling in arguing to raise the debt ceiling now.

Good ol’ democrats; where do they get off calling anyone extreme? About anything? In their world, if something’s worth doing once, it’s worth doing fifty gazillion times.

July 12: “And they only come together if each side is willing to give, the way Ronald Reagan did and Tip O’Neill did, the way Bill Clinton did and Newt Gingrich did, and many of their predecessors in American history.”

July 7: “The consequences of that – as Ronald Reagan believed, as President Obama believes – would be significant and unpredictable and in no way positive.”

July 5: “I will spare you, because I know it’s late in the day and you’re on deadline, reading again the letter from President Reagan.”

June 30: “And I think that, again, it’s always worth reminding those lawmakers on the Hill who think somehow that this is a game, that President Ronald Reagan did not think so.”

June 27: “And I don’t have the letter from President Reagan or the one from Treasury Secretary Baker from the past to cite again today. But this is a position that has been held by many of both parties in the past, including, obviously, the Reagan administration.”

So cute. Oh, I guess that settles it. Let’s all go away now and let the democrats spend as much as they like! For the Gipper!

Well gee; I’m not a democrat, so let’s accommodate me and use a little bit of common sense here instead of reacting to mantras and monikers. Just skim over the curve in the chart presented here and tell me: Viewing our debt limit “progress” from this thirty thousand foot level…do you give a rat’s ass what Ronald Reagan had to say about the debt limit in the 1980’s?

Click image for larger.

It’s unnecessary to say so on a word-for-word basis, to anyone possessing the skill and talent needed to, uh — read a curve on a graph. But obviously this is not a slam against Ronald Reagan, or his decision-making prowess. It’s just a different situation. The numbers are different; the slope is different; the drunkenness on spending, the abuse of power, the indebtedness of future generations, they’re all different.

Also there was some back-stabbing going on in the 1980s. Lessons learned, and all that.

What is the definition of “learning” in psychology? “A non-instinctive behavioral change.” There’s been some learning happening here…a little learning, and a whole lot of spending.

So spare me the virtual seances about what Ronald Reagan would do. I’m not even ready to accept the initial premise, that Reagan would lobby for a debt increase in 2011; Ronald Reagan was capable of learning things too.

Update: My link file includes an article at Heritage.org, examining the federal government’s history of revenue as a percentage of GDP since World War II. As you can see from the first big chart to come up, restricting all federal spending to eighteen percent doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all — it’s never taken in much more than that.

And no, tax rates have not remained static during that time; far from it. It’s a lot of years going by with a lot of different revenue policies in place, and at some point you have to declare you’ve accumulated the experience necessary to figure out what’s going on here. Yeah, eighteen points does seem to be close to our limit, the only question now is, are we committed to living within our means?

Let’s get out our candles and crystal balls, and see what the departed Great Communicator would have to say about that. Not very much of an open question, is it?

Every argument put forward by the Democrats made in context limited to that which will support it. Since in most cases *any* context would show how hollow the argument is, they are limited to these little surgical quotes and dropped names. Fektoids, I think they’re called.

The context here is that Tip O’Neill was a Democrat at a time when they were mostly loyal Americans with a different idea about how to best provide for other Americans. The raising of the debt limit was necessary to the waging of financial war against an existential threat. O’Neill realized this.

The difference between then and now is that first of all and as your chart shows, we are so far beyond sane levels of debt that I doubt Reagan would have chosen that battlefield. The numbers are so out of whack that it’s no longer an apples-to-apples comparison. Second, that breed of Democrat no longer exists. We are not spending to bankrupt the Soviet Union and defeat Communism, we’re currently spending to entrench Communism here at home.

Which, naturally, means nothing because I’m a racist.
- Jason | 07/18/2011 @ 15:17

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

There You Go AgainMonday, July 18th, 2011

There You Go Again
Monday, July 18th, 2011