Chaos Monkeys

One thing I think people are missing is the significance of the scene in the president-elect's box at the Army-Navy football game on December 14, where so many symbolic meetings seemed to be occurring, from Vice President–Elect Vance bringing killer Daniel Penny as his plus-one to the rival secretary of defense candidates Hegseth and DeSantis, but business appeared to be getting done in the deep conversations of Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Senate Majority Leader–Designate John Thune. The world's richest man, Elon Musk, brought a small boy, one of his numerous progeny, but in many of the pictures he looked like a stranger trying to photobomb the event, lonely and wistful, with an oddly large head.

AP photo by Stephanie Scarbrough.

We know what Trump and the congressional leaders were talking about, and it wasn't Musk's many interesting plans for cutting government spending. It was the urgent continuing budget resolution they were planning to vote on in the House on Wednesday the 18th, to prevent a government shutdown on Friday, in fact, and Trump was pushing some new demands in the opposite direction; instead of the resolution they planned, to carry them just to March, forcing them to go through the same thing in a matter of a few months, he wanted them to extend spending out for a full year, until next December, which I think would have been impossible to manage before the deadline, and in addition he wanted them to include a provision suspending the debt ceiling, the thing Democrats usually have to beg Republicans to help them with, because the Republicans are so famously conservative about the national debt.

(The debt ceiling is currently suspended, under the terms of an earlier deal; that's not what would have shut the government down when the deal expired on January 1, but it will shut it down fairly soon, maybe mid-June, at current spending levels, so they most likely will need to re-suspend the debt ceiling, or eliminate it permanently as Trump apparently suggested in his conversation with Johnson and Thune.)

So my theory is Musk didn't enjoy this. His plan to cut two and a half trillion dollars from the national debt was not being taken seriously (he didn't actually have a plan, but everyone should have understood that he was so smart it would happen before you knew it). Trump was going ahead on the assumption that he'd be adding $7.7 trillion over the next ten years. Musk was being slighted.

For the Record: Debt Ceiling

 

Hostage situation. Photo by Matthias Weinberger, 2006.

This is an interesting argument, but I hope it's wrong: that it's indeed Congress's responsibility (14th Amendment) to ensure the government pays its debts, but if they choose not to there's nothing anybody can do about it-- https://t.co/7YqsD2SQcc

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) May 15, 2023

For the Record: Stupid Senator Tricks

 

Thomas Nast, 1872, "A Few Washington Sketches—In the Senate", via Senate Collection (where you can embiggen the image more effectively than here).

This thread has achieved something like virality, even as the issue seems to have been put aside for the next couple of months.

Actually the debt limit was exceeded in August 2019, when it was $16.6 trillion, the last time YOU VOTED TO SUSPEND IT, under McConnell's instructions. About $10 trillion has been added to the national debt WITH YOUR VOTE since then, plus $2 trillion without it last spring.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 7, 2021

This is 100% on Republicans, McConnell in particular, who has been insisting ten years on suspending the debt ceiling instead of raising it, your crazy tax cuts, your mishandling of pandemic and economic crisis, your phony accounting.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 7, 2021

Another day, another stupid Republican senator:

For the Record: Manchin (with bonus rantlet)

 

Via.

And keep in mind that it's not a one-off like the $6 trillion in debt-ballooning Covid relief that Manchin has unhesitatingly voted for in the past 15 months: it's $350 billion per year over a 10-year period, designed to be entirely paid for.

— Wiggles of Weimar (@Yastreblyansky) September 3, 2021

For the Record: Debt Ceiling

The original debt ceiling crisis of 2011, as captured by cartoonist Jen Sorensen.

Did you all realize that the US debt ceiling actually doesn't exist, and hasn't existed for the past eight years? Though it will return, like a zombie, at the end of the month if Congress doesn't manage to stop it.

I did know, without realizing I did until our friend Dr. Volts asked:

I'm certain the answer is yes. It was created by Act of Congress in 1917, as a reasonable alternative to the previous practice of requiring Congress to approve bond issues one at a time. It doesn't exist at the moment at all--it's been "suspended" at two-year intervals since 2013

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 22, 2021

The Fix-the-Debt is In

Drawing, for Munro Leaf's The Story of Ferdinand (1938), by Robert Lawson. Via Geocache.

The "Campaign to Fix the Debt", a self-publicizing organ created as a kind of benefit performance by and for the old vaudeville team of Bowles 'n' Simpson, has been sending me the occasional email ever since I attempted to troll them by honestly answering a fake "survey" on my feelings about the prospects of fixing the debt. There was one of those scrolling-response windows where you can watch your own little post appear at the bottom and then rise, magically, in the surging tide, and finally rapture out of the box; and glory hound that I am, I wanted to see mine there. I didn't: Fix-the-Debt had some kind of censor working that department, and negative things never showed, but back in the email department they still saw me as a customer and kept me on the list. So, in today's mail:

As fans prepare for the upcoming rivalry games, let’s all root for a victory over one of our biggest rivals, the national debt.

Take a look at the graphic and then share it with your fellow fans!

No, wait, this explains everything! Retroactionism revisited

Rep. Morgan Griffith doing his Eric Cantor imitation, in full revolutionary snarl mode. Love the chin whiskers showing that he's not just an oik but a  pretentious oik.

One Republican congressman who is fully aware of the suffering that is being caused by the federal shutdown and will be caused by any default on the country's financial obligations is second-term Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia. But he hastens to clarify, with a Leninesque grandeur, that those are just the eggs you need to break for this particular omelette:

“We have to make a decision that’s right long-term for the United States, and what may be distasteful, unpleasant and not appropriate in the short run may be something that has to be done,” he said. Griffith, a former majority leader of the Virginia House of Delegates, cited as an example the American Revolution. [jump]

Moral turfitude

Image from Men with Foil Hats.

Samuel Knight at Washington Monthly draws our attention to

“Fix The Debt” - the astroturf, defense contractor-linked lobbying group seizing upon the manufactured debt crisis to ram through a corporate agenda at the expense of everyone else - is asking Americans to share stories about how the national debt is affecting them.

No, really:

Why is it so important that we Fix the Debt? Why does it matter to your family? To your business? To our country? to YOU?

Our leaders in Washington need to hear from each of us. We need them to know that inaction is NOT an option. We must Fix the Debt.

You couldn’t make it up.

It’s likely that the majority of responses they are receiving are either full of: A) false generalizations about a “spending problem”; B) speculation about the future of Medicare and Social Security under the assumption that rich tax-dodgers can’t do any more or that the government shouldn’t negotiate with drug companies ripping it off; or C) good old incoherent right wing rambling.

Samuel thinks we might want to give them a chance to hear another point of view. Over and over again. Not so much an email bomb as an email stink bomb to skunk up their tubes. If [jump]

Hook that drive and you could land in the moral hazard

If somebody were to turn over a very large amount of cash to me, I could not only pay off all my credit card debt and the mortgage, but buy a new, much larger apartment, with a washer and dryer, and a big pantry with a chest freezer.

Sausage. From Free-Extras (?).

Then I'd do my basic shopping at Costco, and buy a whole free-range chestnut-fed pig from a gentleman farmer and make my own sausage, and that's not all. I'd start getting really
good clothes—especially shoes—so that I wouldn't have to buy them so often, and season tickets to the opera and the Philharmonic, and memberships in all the museums. Jesus, being rich can save you so much money!

All the people with power keep telling us that a national economy is just like a family, meaning that the nation has to sit down around the kitchen table (assuming it can afford [jump]

Maud, says here Medicare comes from the Government!

Holiday collage by the Chicago Imagist Don Baum. From Archives of American Art Blog.

I haven't seen much response to yesterday's Times report about the poor but conservative and their dependence on government money, but it's pretty extraordinary reading. It's not your Tea Party clowns who really think Medicare isn't a government program, it's people [jump]