John Boehner keeps telling me that our country is broke. Who am I to disbelieve him? If we’re broke, we’re broke.
House Speaker John Boehner routinely offers this diagnosis of the U.S.’s fiscal condition: “We’re broke; Broke going on bankrupt,” he said in a Feb. 28 speech in Nashville.
Boehner’s assessment dominates a debate over the federal budget that could lead to a government shutdown. It is a widely shared view with just one flaw: It’s wrong.
“The U.S. government is not broke,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy for Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. “There’s no evidence that the market is treating the U.S. government like it’s broke.”
The U.S. today is able to borrow at historically low interest rates, paying 0.68 percent on a two-year note that it had to offer at 5.1 percent before the financial crisis began in 2007.
Now, I am just a simple unfrozen caveman lawyer. Your world frightens and confuses me. But the one thing I DO know is that it can’t be good for the image of the United States for the Speaker of the House to go around telling the world and all its potential investors that our country can’t pay its bills. That just seems like a really dumb and basically irresponsible thing for John Boehner to do considering that it isn’t even true. But, hell, it would probably be a stupid and reckless thing to say even if it were true. You know what I’m saying?
Now, I’ve noticed that Boehner is a little less of a jackass when it comes to defaulting on the country’s debt (not that it is doing him any favors with his rowdy caucus). It’s a bit of contradiction, actually. On the one hand, Boehner says it would be a disaster if we didn’t raise the debt ceiling and pay our bills on time…
“I think raising the debt limit is the responsible thing to do for our country, the responsible thing for our economy,” Mr. Boehner said. “If we were to fail to increase the debt limit, we would send our economy into a tailspin.”
…and on the other hand, he’s saying that we can’t pay our bills because “we’re broke, broke going on bankrupt.”
Look. We have to raise the debt ceiling. What does that tell you? It tells me that we’re still failing to raise enough revenue to support what the government wants to do. Either the government has to do less or it has to raise more revenue. Neither of those things would be helpful to the economy in the short-term, so no one rational wants to do either of those things this year. But the Republicans are trying to destroy the very structure of the federal government (except for the defense industry) in the midst of a down economy. The American people don’t support what the GOP wants to do. At least, they don’t support it in detail. In the abstract, if you tell them that we’re broke then maybe they’ll let you bend them over and screw them one more time for old time’s sake. That’s what Boehner is betting on. But it’s all based on lies. It’s bad policy. It’s policy that cannot be imposed on the Senate or the administration. And it’s not even a policy that has the uniform support of his crazy caucus.
It’s a sad spectacle. The country needs to stop borrowing money soon, but right now we need to make smart investments and put people to work. We can afford to do that. The only thing that’s broke is John Boehner’s conscience and the moral compass of his merry band of banksters.
