Howard Dean says the problem is that the TEA Party carries too much weight in the primaries. For once Mr. Dean is perceptive, and we will hopefully continue to be a problem for him.
The Tea Party refusal to raise taxes in conjunction with the immense amount of entitlement cuts to raise revenue and pay down the debt is why we have a AA+ rating. Like I was saying earlier in the thread - signing pledges saying "I will never, ever raise taxes" removes a tool to balance the budget and hinders proper governance. Taxes and spending are an optimization problem. They shouldn't be used as leverage for short term political gains.
As stocks continued Monday to tumble in the wake of Standard & Poor?s downgrade of the United States? credit rating, Democrats are working to place the blame for the move squarely on the shoulders of ?tea party? movement.
David Axelrod, a top campaign adviser to President Obama, led the charge over the weekend, calling S&P?s action ?essentially a tea party downgrade.?
?The tea party brought us to the brink of default,? Axelrod said. ?It was the right thing to do to avoid that default. It was the wrong thing to do to push the country to that point."
While Axelrod was talking on CBS? ?Face the Nation,? Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the former Democratic presidential candidate, was offering a similar characterization on NBC?s ?Meet the Press.?
?I believe this is without question the tea party downgrade,? Kerry said. ?This is the tea party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered even the will of many Republicans in the United States Senate who were prepared to do a bigger deal.?
Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, also on CBS, also took the anti-spending, small-government movement to task:
?I think this is [the] tea party?s problem,? Dean said. ?I think they?re totally unreasonable and doctrinaire and not founded in reality. I think they?ve been smoking some of that tea, not just drinking it.?
Standard & Poor?s sought to avoid placing blame on either Democrats or Republicans in particular while citing uncertainty over the nation?s spiraling debt and ceaseless government gridlock as the drivers of the downgrade.
For Democrats, it marked the latest attempt to sway public opinion in the wake of the last-minute debt-ceiling deal last week that was met with disapproval by a large swath of Americans and Wall Street money managers, while sending Congress? popularity to new lows.
Blaming the tea party might have some political upside, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released last week showed that public attitudes against the movement are increasingly hardening
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I'll believe corporations are persons when Texas executes one.: LBJ's Ghost
You can blame the tea party all you want... Here are the facts.
To the folks who want to continue with big government expansion and more of the same it IS the Tea party who is at fault.
To those who want "compromise" (also like more of the same, tax and spend) it IS the Tea party who is at fault.
To the Tea Party, it is the Big Government and high cost that is at fault.
So, that means that depending where one stands, noone is incorrect. If it wasn't for the Tea party wanting to reduce our bloated expensive government, the ceiling would have been raised as it always has with no problem and our credit rating would have stayed at AAA (why, I don't know...). But no. The Tea party folks were voted in to shake things up in washington and I think they are doing a good job at it! Nobody said it would be easy!
The debt rating is a ratio of GDP to spending among other factors. The tea party in the house tanked it because they can't do the math to figure out they need an appropriate tax hike to match the cuts and raise revenue to pay down the debt.
We hit the qualifications to keep our AAA rating, but we were downgraded because the tea party turned what should have been a procedural lack luster operation into a near constitutional crisis and went so far as to demand an amendment to the constitution. Additionally, the amendment they wanted required 2/3 of the house and senate to raise taxes making it almost more feasible to have a new constitutional convention than to raise taxes. Surely you can see this is ridiculous.
It's partially his fault. Deregulating as much as possible or defunding regulatory agencies and cutting taxes with two unfunded wars pretty much handicapped the federal government. Regan-Bush I-Clinton era economic policies and interest rates lead to the inevitable housing market catastrophe.
The Tea Party really is just the latest in a comedy (I guess this more of a tragedy though) of economic errors. Although this one seemed really avoidable.
I find it ironic that one of the biggest factors in the credit rating change was not mentioned much in the above posts. "especially on entitlements"
Quote:
Originally Posted by drsocc
I don't really see the irony. Entitlement spending is encompassed by public spending.
Exactly. S&P stated their main reason for the downgrade was the "prolonged controversy" and the "contentious and fitful process". The stated that they were unconcerned with whether the deficit was met with increased revenue or decreased expenditures; the problem was that what should have happened in April wasn't put in place until a few hours before the absolute deadline.
Quote:
Originally Posted by YelloJeep
You can blame the tea party all you want... Here are the facts.
To the folks who want to continue with big government expansion and more of the same it IS the Tea party who is at fault.
To those who want "compromise" (also like more of the same, tax and spend) it IS the Tea party who is at fault.
To the Tea Party, it is the Big Government and high cost that is at fault.
So, that means that depending where one stands, noone is incorrect. If it wasn't for the Tea party wanting to reduce our bloated expensive government, the ceiling would have been raised as it always has with no problem and our credit rating would have stayed at AAA (why, I don't know...). But no. The Tea party folks were voted in to shake things up in washington and I think they are doing a good job at it! Nobody said it would be easy!
There's an old story about a man who can't sleep because the noise from his clock keeps him up all night. His doctor prescribes a cat, a dog, a rooster, a parrot, a chimp, all locked in his bedroom with him for 7 days. On the 8th day, the doctor tells him to get rid of the animals. The man is no longer bothered by the clock.
So, too, will the American public feel when they finally decide to get rid of the Tea Party in the next election. The only good to come from them is perspective. As bad as Washington politics normally are, the Tea Party shows us how bad they could be.
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We work together every damn day. --Jon Stewart
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