The Way Government Budget-Debt Ceiling Negotiations Seem Today

This may be the biggest economic issue of the year. The Congress seems to be bungling the job, yet that is natural.

The Republicans picked the fight using the deficit ceiling vote as an excuse to punch around the Democrats once more. With one branch of the legislature they expect to dictate to the Democrats on the budget knowing they have a stronger will. They are at economic war with the Democrats rather than a cooperative party seeking the good of the people. They do not know where the United States is though. Their center of effort is in Beijing these days.

Republicans have experienced a weak Democratic opposition party for 20 years. Just last December the President through in the towel on letting the Bush era tax cuts expire and danced a jig for Wall Street. Even Chelsea Clinton took a job with one of those quant/hedge fund firms in 2007 or 2008-maybe the President is looking ahead for job security for his kids on Wall Street.

The Democratic Party is encountering a Republican Party House leadership that expects it to roll over some time before high noon the day of default. Sen. Majority leaders Reed is seeming more obliging every day now offering a timid, obliging kinds of plan that just cut spending and doesn't raise taxes-he seems to have no concept of negotiating tactics.

Majority Leader Reed keeps offering sweeter packages to Republicans expecting them to finally buy a package eventually. Republican know that the Democrats will keep moving toward their side and cut everything that goes to the people rather than to corporations from the budget so far as possible. What would have worked was setting a final offer last week for the Republicans to take or let the budget default crash occur.
That plan should have raised taxes on the rich and cut spending with an immediate surplus not requiring the debt ceiling to be raised. The surplus should pay down the federal debt right away.

The trouble is the democrats have developed a political philosophy-a Darwinian founded deep zeitgeist that promotes irrationalism. The Republicans have developed their own irrational economic philosophy to match the democrats and raise them one to the quant approach to Wall Street profit taking. That's a Darwinian based disembodied capitalism making the irrational profit taking of market computing analytical programs capitalism in-itself. The real world, quaint, nationalistic, Adam Smith Wealth of Nations is dead in that paradigm. Nothing is real except the abstract mathematical and statistical world of market phenomenal modeling and gaming profits in the new Wall Street; Americans are just detritus, artifacts or externalities to The Truth of the profit formulae.