By Patricia H. Kushlis
The Conservative Party of America claims Obama won the recent debt ceiling crisis shoot-out in Washington DC while voices on the Left claim the Tea Party reigns victorious. Should the issue be seen simply as one of who blinked or who caved first as so often portrayed by our increasingly partisan 24/7 media throughout that finger-biting weekend and its aftermath?
Standard and Poor’s (S&P), one of the three major government bond rating agencies, waited until after the stock market closed on Friday to downgrade US government debt from its 70 year old triple A rating to AA+ -lowering its standing to that of Belgium and New Zealand although the US Treasury argues that “A judgment flawed by a $2 trillion error, speaks for itself.” Since the downgrading had been rumored for over a week, it’s unclear whether the S&P’s pronouncement will usher in a self-fulfilling prophecy by raising rates the US will need to pay for borrowing – or given the lack of alternatives – be shrugged off in today’s turbulent economic world.
An aside: Here’s a snapshot of a few select, but important, S&P ratings which, in themselves, make me wonder about how several were calculated: AAA: UK, France, Germany, Canada, Australia; AA+: USA, Belgium, New Zealand; AA-: Japan, China. Source: S&P
It’s not that I disagree with the team’s concerns about current US political problems – the dysfunctional result of our divide and rule form of government and an election last fall that produced the current stalemate. But it wasn’t divide and rule that got the country into the current economic mess.
It began with the illegal election of an incompetent and fiscally irresponsible president in 2000 and yet again in 2004 which is when – in my view – a bond rating agency like the S&P should have issued its warnings if it were truly nervous about this country’s lack of political maturity - rather than waiting until now.
Regardless, this year’s non-crisis crisis was manufactured by the 80 some Tea Party neophytes in Congress and a weak Republican House leadership that simply could not control party ranks. After all, the US government debt-ceiling was raised seven – or possibly even eight- times under President George W Bush – with nary a stir and under divided government.
I suppose in retrospect the Obama administration could, and should have dealt with the debt ceiling issue last fall once and for all when the Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress, but why should it have had to do so?
This time the howls of self-righteous fiscal irresponsibility turned into a nasty, partisan war-hoop that needlessly shook the halls of financial institutions here and abroad as well as those of Congress sending the stock market into sharp decline – until, at least, traders looked around at the July jobs report and the unappetizing alternatives. Switzerland can, after all, absorb only so much capital and the UK is in flames.
The new Republican House “minority-majority” was put into office in a low turnout mid-term election by a coalition of conservative Republican business interests that included the deep pockets of the US Chamber of Commerce, the stealthy wallets of the right wing’s shadowy Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch’s unrelenting unfair and unbalanced Fox News television “news” reporters and radio talk show hosts who irresponsibly and without credible facts spewed their brand of anti- Obama, conservative economic palliatives for what ails this country’s economy - beginning with the Tea Party’s first Halloween-costumed prance-around at the dawn’s early light in April 2009.
True, these newcomers upset the status quo – knocking off establishment Republicans in the primaries as well as the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives in November.
But to what extent these freshmen Congresspersons even represent the will of their supporters is another question. Or has their intransigence gone too far - among other things – by publicly embarrassing John Boehner, the Republican House’s elected speaker, who does know the meaning of compromise – to get their way?
In the end, Boehner fashioned a coalition of establishment Republicans and centrist Democrats to support the compromise while the Tea Party Congressional faithful thumbed their noses at him and the country including many of their rank and file supporters. Tea Party poll numbers, by the way, appear to be plummeting.
Then there's the Tea Party Caucus' tone deafness to the warnings of their corporate patrons including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers who strongly advised their unruly clients to climb down from their self-imposed precipice. Or?
The Tea Party is not a party
Yet how monolithic is the Tea Party and how important as a political protest movement will it turn out to be in the overall scheme of American politics? Will its leaders decide to break from the traditional Republican Party and form a political party of its own or will they continue, as they have been doing, to attempt a raucous, made for media, takeover of the GOP from within? Or, will the Tea Party ultimately fade away as has happened with other far right wing movements in America’s past waiting to return in some other guise and under new leadership to play again another day?
Kate Zernike’s excellent political reporting on the Tea Party over the past several months for The New York Times has unearthed a number of facts that suggest these zealots in Congress and their rank-and-file voters do not read from the same score card – in fact, she tells us that the movement is so amorphous that its rank-and-file adherents do not themselves see eye-to-eye. Yes, it is a movement on the conservative side of the spectrum but it is also very much a coalition of forces expressing real and perceived grievances and views that do not necessarily coincide.
Most importantly, the Times/CBS polling that Zernike cites has shown that the majority of Tea Party supporters are less doctrinaire than their elected officials. Zernike found that they do believe in political compromise, did not rule out tax increases as part of a grand bargain and – like the majority of Americans –simply wanted to see an end to the faux-crisis: And one that would not toss the country and their stock portfolios off the financial cliff.
Bloom off the Tea Party rose?
As importantly, a CBS/New York Times poll taken in mid-July showed a far smaller percentage of voters pledging allegiance to the Tea Party this summer (22%) than exit polling showed supported the Tea Party last November (40%). Now this data can be interpreted in various ways. On the one hand, it suggests that budget cutting and fiscal conservatism are one thing – clearly these people have never read John Maynard Keynes or The New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman so they will have missed the fact that the federal government really does have more tools available to influence the functioning of the US economy short and long term than does an individual household or a mom-and-pop convenience store – but on the other, the poll data also demonstrates that this right-wing crew is far from united as to how the federal budget and deficit - not to mention other contentious social issues - should be handled.
Furthermore, a majority of those voters interviewed stressed that dealing with the weak employment picture and the economy itself were more important to them than raising - or not - the federal debt ceiling.
This contradiction and other stranger ones show up in spades in a recent New York Times/CBS poll taken in the wake of the budget deal and reported in more detail on August 8, 2011.
Shattering of two Republican mantras in one fell swoop
Yet one of the most interesting results of recent polling suggests that even some Tea Party officials and voters think the US spends too much on the military – a break from the Republican Party’s support-our-troops-at-all-costs mantra of the recent past. This is corroborated by Gallup and Washington Post public opinion polls taken in early and mid-July and reported by University of Maryland political polling analyst Steven Kull. Kull pointed out that Republican and Democrat respondents alike agreed to significant cuts in a wide range of areas (as well as tax increases) and that the largest reductions for both was defense.
Unlike others on the Right for whom defense decreases are still anathema, there are Congressional Tea Party members (and not just their voters) who are willing to have that oversized budget included among the items on the table subject to the budget ax.
If the Left would stop sulking, it would see that although it did not get the tax increases that I too think should have been part of the deal, the Republicans blinked on reducing the bloated military which currently consumes 20% of the entire budget. Furthermore, a majority of their supporters do not agree with the signing of Grover Norquist’s no-new-taxes pledge. Both are important take-aways for the future. Republicans reportedly blinked on other items as well. Maybe the next item should be to do away with debt ceiling entirely.
Now I doubt that cutting the military budget will help lower the unemployment rate because it will cut into employment at defense-industry firms dependent upon the Pentagon for weapons contracts as well as reduce the numbers of active duty enlisted personnel (I understand the officer corps is harder to cut).
I, however, have thought for a long time that US foreign policy implementation could do quite nicely with far less hardware, fewer troops and defense contractors and more effective use of career diplomats, aid personnel, public diplomacy specialists and peace corps volunteers who speak the local language, understand the culture, wear civilian clothes and work for non-defense related agencies.
One major problem is that their numbers are miniscule and their budgets represent only around 1% of the US federal budget - if that. Frankly, since the end of the Cold War and history’s faux-end, the US hasn't had enough experienced diplomats to make the needed shift in this country’s national security face abroad. And experienced diplomats don't just sprout up like mushrooms after a rain.
Whether civilians are more or less expensive on a per capita basis than soldiers depends, I think, on what they are asked to do, what their qualifications are and what their salary grade levels are. A civilian professional who speaks Russian, Chinese, Korean or Arabic, for instance, may well cost more on paper than someone in the military wearing combat boots and brandishing a machine gun but unable to communicate with the natives in their own language. But I’ll bet if you take into consideration the expensive military hardware, training, and upkeep - the comparative costs will be a lot closer and certainly the resentment abroad to a smaller US military “footprint” and a healthier civilian presence will be far lower.
Moreover, if Ohio State University professor John Mueller is correct about the multiple weaknesses of Al Qaeda then the US either needs to find a real adversary to expend zillions of dollars on fighting or substantially reduce the amount spent on opposing Islamic terrorism –and use what does remain in the foreign affairs kitty far more intelligently at home and abroad. This includes resources that can and should transcend agency lines. If ever there was a rationale for massive troop withdrawals from both Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mueller’s article in Foreign Affairs is it. And a reduction of troops should also reduce the number of contractors hired to support them.
Changing the dial to get the country out of its economic doldrums
This post is not a comprehensive proposal by any matter of means but, who knows, maybe the kernel of one. What I am suggesting is that there are persuasive arguments about America’s role abroad that can be used to “change the dial” that would also help get this country out of its economic conundrum – and this administration should be using them more effectively than it now does.
How all this squares with the S&P credit downgrade is another question. The turbulence in the markets with investors selling stocks on Monday, buying them on Tuesday and rushing to buy both gold and US T-bills while the UK pound depreciated against the dollar just shows how confused the situation is.
I’m personally not convinced, for instance, that the UK Coalition’s Austerity Plan is going to result in that country’s economy being any more robust than the politically dysfunctional one right here in river city on the Potomac – yet that doesn’t seem to concern S&P raters. After all, an economic plan that has thrown middle and lower classes out of work thereby reducing overall purchasing power, tipping an economy into depression, and inflaming riots in the London suburbs does not sound like a healthy long term bet to me.
Or how the German and French economies are going to weather the ongoing EURO-zone crisis with far fewer economic and political tools at their disposal than those of the US government is another question that needs to be considered.
Nevertheless, I agree. The US does have serious political and economic problems that desperately need to be addressed but then maybe American voters will have second thoughts about reelecting those funny folk in Colonial garb with 17th century ideas, the US business community will stop trembling at their very sight and shift its campaign war chest to politicians who do understand the basics of 21st century economics and politics and just perhaps, the S&P will review the competency of its own staff and its ability to use a calculator.