Under the Big Top

On Tuesday, the Biden team said they were continuing to negotiate with Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy over a “smaller and smaller” circle of items, including “reforms to energy permitting, new work requirements for some forms of federal aid, and the redistribution of unused Covid-19 emergency funds,” reported mainstream news.

Reports of what a default could mean to the US economy have been stark, with a CNN report citing 8 million jobs evaporating, and an op-ed from The Hill suggesting tens of thousands of lives could be lost, indicating the economic downturn from the Great Recession of 2007-2009 pushed 100 million people into extreme poverty.

If that’s the case, if there’s an understanding of those sorts of risks, then why would any agency or program be spared from the chopping block? Whether it’s been spent or not, the US Army Corps of Engineers had a plan in 2019 to spend $800 million on booby traps to control Asian carp in the Great Lakes. Is that program worth more than defaulting on the national debt payments?

In 2019, an audit of the Pentagon cost $428 million to conduct and another $472 million to fix problems the audit uncovered. This is despite the fact that the Pentagon has failed the last 7 audits. They’ve never even come close to passing one.

$4.5 billion was signed off on last August in order to pay for the Ukrainian pension plan and other social programs, which in light of “an economic and financial catastrophe” would seem an easy cut.

In the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill passed under Biden, there’s a variety of fringe spending, from $5 billion to buy all-new electric school buses, to $7.5 billion to build electric charging stations, to $65 billion to upgrade broadband internet connections.

It would take no time at all for Congress to defund these fringe projects and pay the interest on the debt without an increase in borrowing costs.

Since 1960, the debt ceiling has been raised 80 times. As far as checks on power go, one could call it porous at best. Furthermore, most increases have been preceded by a game of political chicken, ultimately and up until now, always ending in an increase in the borrowing limit.

Based on these criteria, the national media routinely refers to it as a “circus”. But the real circus comes in the form of what this demonstrates to nations and groups who lend the US government the money it wishes to borrow.

By omitting the fact that current spending could be sacrificed to pay back those who have loaned the government money, the Treasury Department has designated the nation’s creditors as the absolute lowest point on the totem pole—to be paid back only with borrowed money, and less deserving than any and all other federal programs. WaL

PICTURED ABOVE: Kevin McCarthy as a congressman.