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Politico...
Debt
ceiling disaster averted, but
nobody’s really happy
By David Rogers
8/2/11
Running
short of cash, Treasury won an
immediate reprieve of $400 billion in new borrowing authority Tuesday
with the
enactment of a hotly contested debt and deficit-reduction agreement
hammered
out between Republicans and the White House on Sunday night.
President
Barack Obama, not hiding his
frustration, quickly signed the measure sent to him by Congress after a
final
74-26 Senate roll call, capping an unprecedented hard-edged political
struggle
that had pushed the nation to the brink of default.
Indeed,
the stakes were far larger
than with the April shutdown fight, and more than any single event this
year,
the debt battle captured all the power — and critics would say extreme
risk-taking — of the anti-government backlash that fueled the GOP’s
gains in
the 2010 elections.
The
timing makes it a gamble too with
the faltering recovery. Most of the promised $2.1 trillion in deficit
reduction
will take place in the out years, but discretionary spending will
continue to
fall in 2012 and the same Congressional Budget Office — which scored
the cuts —
will soon issue its August economic update, which could show slower
growth.
House
Speaker John Boehner has argued
the opposite: More aggressively addressing deficits “will in fact
provide more
confidence for employers in America, the people we expect to reinvest
in our
economy and create jobs.” But a sell-off Tuesday on Wall Street sent
the Dow
down 265 points, reflecting growing pessimism about the economic
outlook. And
as lawmakers left for the summer recess, Democrats vowed to turn the
agenda
more toward job creation when they return.
“We
crossed a bridge,” said House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) “Enough talk about the debt. We
have to
talk about jobs.”
Obama
signaled as much in a Rose
Garden appearance after the Senate vote. Extending his
2-percentage-point cut
in payroll taxes remains a priority and the appropriations bargain, in
fact, gives
him a leg up in bargaining with House Republicans over investments
billed as
part of his jobs agenda.
“It
was a long and contentious debate”
Obama said of the debt fight. “And I want to thank the American people
for
keeping up the pressure on their elected officials to put politics
aside and
work together.
“Voters
may have chosen divided
government, but they sure didn’t vote for dysfunctional government.
They want
us to solve problems. They want us to get this economy growing and
adding
jobs.”
Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.), who played a central role in crafting the final compromise
with Vice
President Joe Biden, was more upbeat.
“It
may have been messy. It might have
appeared to some like their government wasn’t working,” McConnell told
fellow
senators minutes before the vote. “But, in fact, the opposite was true.
The
push and pull Americans saw in Washington these past few weeks was not
gridlock. It was the will of the people working itself out in a
political
system that was never meant to be pretty. … It was a debate that
Washington
needed to have.”
Read
the rest of the story at Politico
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