We must cut off our noses in order to save our faces

Let's see if I understand this correctly: Budget hawks, austerity buffs and the right in America are threatening to block the approval of the legal raising of the US debt limit.  The threat itself is widely understood as a large potential hazard to our borrowing, our creditors, and how the international bond market views investing in the US Treasury.  That is, the threat of not extending the debt limit means the US may default on its present debt obligations with known negative consequences.

Why is this threat being brandished?  Ostensibly to avoid future default of US debt obligations.  And theoretical future negative consequences.

Qua?

If I Were King of the For-r-r-r-rest!

The decisions to keep Guantanamo open and to try the 9-11 plotters in military commissions rather than in our court system make it difficult to come to any other conclusion than we are cowardly.  I supported Attorney General Holder's original decision to try KSM in federal court in New York City.  I wish we had the courage to uphold our professed values in our legal system, our constitution, and ourselves.

What do you think?  Can you offer a compelling argument that we are not cowards?

all hail the chief

I'll commemorate the 30th anniversary of the attempted assassination of President Reagan with this thought:

It’s not very (small-d) democratic for our president to enjoy the elaborate security web that we’ve developed over the last half century.   If one citizen is thousands of times (millions?) more important to protect than another something is wrong with how we’re running things.  And if an entire metropolis grinds to a crawl when the president drives through town, we have at least the trappings of a monarchy.

I, for one, do not welcome our new (non-computer) overlords

We're so afraid of class warfare here in the US.  In fact, the phrase is pretty much used only perjoratively these days.  But I'm quite happy to see the anger in Wisconsin and other places, in which ordinary people are finally starting to catch fire, like damper, flame-retardant versions of Mohamed Bouazizi.  I'm happy to see sparks of class struggle.

Will the (unsuccessful) fight put up by the public sector unions in Madison signal the beginning of a broader fight?  A fight to reclaim our society from the decades long trends of (i) scandalous wealth concentration, (ii) hatred of the public sector and of government, (iii) the nearly complete take-over of our governments by the wealthy and powerful?  Robert Reich argues the salient point: It's not just unfair that the wealthy have gained control over so much, well, wealth, but rather that all the concentration of wealth is corrosive to democracy.  All that wealth and power corrupts our political institutions, pays for our political system, maintains an infrastructure of lobbyists, captures our regulatory machinery, controls much of our political speech and media, etc.  The wealthy, the powerful and the G.O.P. would have us believe - DO have many of us believing - that our problems are due to government, unions, "special interests", the elite, liberals, etc.  Those arguments are smokescreens, distractions, herrings.  Our real trouble is unprecedented concentration of wealth in our society.

I had thought that a civic realization of the nature of the problem would be the first step in the restoration of a healthy, equitable and democratic American society.  But maybe not.  Maybe it's a raw rising up, Madison-style that is the first step, with the intellectual arguments coming into focus only after we start to really fight.

...from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli...

Mexico is fast becoming a failed narco state.  We're already supplying the Mexican government with overt military, intelligence and economic aid in the drug war (the Mérida Initiative), and based on past behavior, we may be supplying covert military aid to Mexico as well.

Libya is in revolt, with the regime of Khaddifi killing citizens by the hundreds - maybe thousands. The pressure to somehow intervene in Libya is growing. 

How long before history repeats and the US re-enacts the opening lyrics to the Marine's Hymm?

Bernal

Here's a typical story from my neighborhood in Bernal Heights, San Francisco.  I think the only thing this story says is that I live in a place in which people have time and money.

thinking clearly about debt

In the 2000's, the country couldn't think straight about mortgage, consumer and public debt.  We went crazy, borrowed on silly terms, traded financial instruments based on sliced and diced mortgages, used our houses as ATMS, and borrowed lots of public money at the state and federal levels without putting it on the books.

Not very rational.

But we're not more rational about debt now in the 2010's.  Congress and the Tea Partiers are obsessed with our public debt.  And many of the rest of us are anxious about it.  But where's the evidence that we're in a debt crisis?  Today, borrowing is cheap by any historical measure.  That will change someday, and change rapidly.  But that won't affect the debt we've piled up, any more than rising interest rates will affect your fixed 30-year mortgage payments.  It may mean that we'd fairly suddenly have to cut public spending someday.  But where's the logic in cutting today?  Is it our plan to drastically and painfully cut services and public spending today so that someday when borrowing costs rise we don't have to drastically and painfully cut services and public spending?

Rand Paul said this week "Our whole economy is equal to our debt now."  But that statement doesn't mean anything.  If you have a $200,000 mortgage on your house and you make $200,000 a year, is there a debt crisis? Is your "whole income equal to your debt?"  It makes more sense to compare your debt service to your income.  And, with a 14 trillion dollar debt and 14 trillion dollar GDP, our debt service is maybe 5% of our GDP.  That's what matters, and by any standards of finance, paying 5% interest on income or revenue is good.  How much of your income goes to debt service?  I'll bet it's more than 5%.  Why should the nation be judged differently?

Part of what is going on is that we're just scared in a rapidly changing world.  Another part is that humans don't understand numbers very well.  Witness the endless journalistic mix-up between the words billions, millions and trillions.  Not a week goes by that I don't hear the numbers 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000  or 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 mistakenly interchanged.  That's like mixing up 1 and 1000.

Breathe deep, work on your math skills, don't get scared by big numbers, be on guard for fear-mongering rhetoric and read my earlier post on the national debt.