Editor's Note: Each week we
cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel's column at the
WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina's column here.
In the melodrama that is consuming Washington this hot summer, featuring
the spectacle of how much Tea Party Republicans will be able to extort
for agreeing not to blow up the economy, the values and priorities of
most Americans were early casualties. That reality will drive—no matter
what the resolution this week—new, independent citizen mobilizations
challenging both Republican zealotry and Democratic cravenness.
The debt-ceiling debate
has lasted long enough for most Americans to start paying attention and
to realize just how divorced both parties are from basic common sense.
With the economy faltering and 25 million people in need of full-time
work, most Americans want Washington focused on how to create jobs and
get the economy going, not on slashing spending for the rising number of
poor children while sheltering tax havens for millionaires.
Equally inexplicable is the president’s apparent eagerness to
negotiate with a legislative faction willing to hold the entire economy
hostage—and one prepared to extort concessions in backroom deals that it
could not achieve in any normal legislative process. Negotiating with
fiscal terrorists only encourages them.
On National Public Radio last week, Representative Tom Cole, a
Republican deputy whip, was giddy about the potential for calamity.
Asked if it was a mistake to try to cut spending by threatening the US
economy, Cole replied :
“No, I don’t think so. Frankly, I think it’s one of the good things
that’s come out of this. We’ll never have a debt-ceiling increase again
without serious efforts to deal with the long-term spending.”
Whatever the terms of the eventual agreement, we know they will be
remarkably cruel. As Robert Greenstein, the respected director of the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted last week that every plan
on the table now is far worse—cutting more from programs for the poor,
exacting pain on the most vulnerable in our society—than anything Jim
DeMint, the most extreme right-wing senator of all, was demanding last
year.
The emerging compromise plans cut around $1 trillion over ten years
from programs such as schools, clean water, mass transit, clean energy
and public health with no—zero—contributions from the wealthy or
corporations through increased taxes or the closing of loopholes. They
set up a Congressional super-committee armed with expedited voting
powers and with the explicit mandate to cut Social Security, Medicare
and Medicaid.
Editor's Note: Read the full text of Katrina's column here .
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