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April 11, 2011

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A debt disaster behind a comic book budget squabble

Clive Crook:

The world had better start paying attention to the US government's inability to govern. The prevailing mood over this has been strangely complacent. Six months of the fiscal year gone and only now a ramshackle budget? Government brought to the brink of shutdown over trifling disagreements? Absurd, one thinks, but this is Washington. Do as most Americans do, and regard the pantomime with blithe contempt. In the end, out of sheer exhaustion, the actors do their deals and it is business as usual.

So it proved with the shutdown farce. Capitol Hill and its followers tracked the quarrel avidly. TV news showed clocks counting down the hours and minutes before "inessential services" would be suspended. Talks between Congress and the White House were covered as though a nuclear strike was imminent. With an hour to go, a deal that no one understood was done.

The president stood before the cameras: "Americans of different beliefs came together again," he said, as if expecting applause. Some laughed; most yawned.

The shutdown punch-up was a nuisance and proof of Washington's recklessness, but little apart from political advantage was at stake. Mostly, it was theatre. But a real fiscal crisis is coming. The debt-ceiling fight, next on the playbill, raises the theoretical possibility of a government default. Beyond that, public debt keeps rising. The current dysfunction shows how hard it will be to stop.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at April 11, 2011 3:19 AM
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