Quick -- someone find Eugene Robinson a first-rate political exorcist, so that the ghastly demon of David Broder's aggressive conventionality can be properly cursed and then sternly heaved from the unfortunate Eugene's head.
He writes:
There is no good reason for negotiations on the budget and the debt ceiling to be deadlocked, because the solution is obvious: First, do no harm.
Just what was the point of that line? To reemphasize the obvious, of course that solution is obvious. And naturally any sane, responsible Congress would hew to that salubrious axiom. But, Eugene, when was the last time you heard anyone reference this Congress as ... oh, never mind.
He proceeds:
Democrats are right that this is a terrible moment for spending cuts. Republicans are right that this is an awful moment for tax increases ... it’s hard to imagine how taking money out of consumers’ hands — either through cuts in government spending or tax increases — could possibly make things better.
Now that -- all that ghostly spooking of reality -- is scary. Not only are average Democrats "right that this is a terrible moment for spending cuts," but above-average Democrats (whom Eugene seems not to have noticed) are even more right that this is a splendid time for spending increases. Since congressional intelligence has been banned this year by Tea Party fiat, however, I won't dwell on intelligent remedies. I would ask whence Eugene got the notion that this "awful moment for tax increases" is related in any conceivable manner or any material place to American "consumers." The only plausible tax increases under discussion are the elimination of some plutocratic subsidies -- not many consumers are panicked over losing their corporate-jet leg up -- and even disallowed discussions of raising income taxes on the top bracket are scarcely "consumer"-oriented.
In the end, Eugene resorts not to the pathetic ghost of Broderian conventional wisdom, but the desperate straw-man bugaboo of vintage George Will:
[I]t’s hard to believe that running trillion-dollar deficits every year is sound policy. Economists who confidently tell us that it’s no problem that the national debt is approaching 100 percent of gross domestic product sound as if they’re whistling past the graveyard.
For starters, no economist has suggested "trillion-dollar deficits every year" -- in perpetuity, as implied. Also, Eugene, in 1945 -- and in modeled accordance with Keynesian theory, which pulled us out of the depression -- the national debt stood at 117 percent of GDP, and the year after it reached 122 percent. Thereafter, because of sound fiscal management, it declined, steadily until ... 1982. It then continued rising until a few small dips in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but, then again, whoops, in 2002, it relaunched.
Gee, I do so wonder if there was some political causation behind those chronological correlations?
Sorry to be so snarky, but, come on. The same Laffable cretins who needlessly caused the massive indebtedness spikes of the last 30 years are now demanding -- and as the overall minority party, no less -- that their fiscally methodological madness be caressed and singularly favored, again.
Come back, Eugene. Come back to Earth, re-alight on reality, and for heaven's sake look around: When it comes to deliberating sane fiscal management, one must begin by acknowledging that the GOP is hopelessly out to lunch; it's primal aim is not to save the system, it's to destroy it.