07 January, 2013

The GOP's Dangerous Debt-Ceiling Threat

The GOP's Dangerous Debt-Ceiling Threat:
In 2011, the mere threat of not raising the debt ceiling was enough to slow economic growth to a crawl, and nearly erase the gains of the previous months. Put another way, what Cornyn has signaled—along with most of the Republican Party—is a willingness to crash the economy and damage the full faith and credit of the United States if President Obama doesn’t adopt core parts of the conservative agenda. Either Democrats slash and dismantle programs for working and middle-class Americans—including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—or Republicans will “kill the hostage” and plunge us into a second global recession.

Oddly, large swaths of the press is treating this as a routine negotiation, and not as an extraordinary and irresponsible threat to our national well-being. In two posts worth reading, Greg Sargent and Alec MacGillis document the extent to which the mainstream media is unalarmed by the GOP’s actions. For example, here’s Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post, “Make no mistake: No deal on the fiscal cliff was a political loser for Republicans; this is an issue they needed to get off the table in order to find better political ground—debt ceiling—to make their stand.”

There’s something very wrong with Washington journalism when a threat to imperil the global economy is treated like a round of capture-the-flag.