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Cleveland
Plain Dealer...
House
Speaker John Boehner is rewarded
with stock market plunge
By Dale McFeatters
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Scripps
Howard News Service
The
evening after his House passed a
debt-ceiling bill that was all spending cuts and no revenue increases,
Speaker
John Boehner took a victory lap.
“When
you look at this final agreement
that we came to with the White House, I got 98 percent of what I
wanted. I’m
pretty happy,” he said. Other Republican lawmakers boasted that they
had seized
control of fiscal policy.
It
may have been a “Mission
Accomplished” moment --- meaning, instead of a victory, the worst may
be yet to
come.
Late
Friday, Aug. 5, Standard &
Poor’s, admittedly under sloppy circumstances, downgraded the quality
of U.S.
debt on the grounds that the agreement’s mechanism to pay down the
deficit
solely through spending cuts is economically and politically
unrealistic.
Confronted
with the wreckage they had
caused, Tea Party movement followers, the driving force behind the
“rule or
ruin” tactics, began edging away from their handiwork. Tea Party
leaders like
Michele Bachmann explained that it was all President Barack Obama’s
fault
because he’s, well, he’s Barack Obama.
Most
of the American people aren’t
buying it. A New York Times/CBS poll found 57 percent disapproving of
the way
Boehner is handling his job. That’s 10 points higher than Obama’s
disapproval
ratings.
The
markets may recover. We can only
hope so for the savings of average Americans. They don’t care about Tea
Party
followers’ ideological purity or the inability of a veteran legislator
like
Boehner to face them down. They care about their retirement money.
The
Republicans’ single-minded focus
on spending cuts has prepared the way for another dilemma. The
debt-ceiling
deal calls for an immediate $350 billion cut in defense spending, and
if a deal
can’t be reached to cut even more defense spending, the Pentagon gets
slapped
with an automatic $500 billion cut.
With
troops likely still fighting in
Afghanistan, a residual force in Iraq and naval patrols in the volatile
Mediterranean and off the Horn of Africa, which member of the Tea Party
is
going to step forward and tell the armed forces they have to keep on
fighting,
although with $850 billion less to do it with?
Well,
at least the Tea Party
Republicans can take comfort they got what they wanted. Maybe they got
out of
the market in time.
Read
it at the Cleveland Plain Dealer
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