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Don’t Get Excited, but We Could Have an Agreement Here (Corrected and Updated)
Ezra Klein Has A Magic Solution to the Debt Ceiling “Crisis”, but the Politics Make Him Sad.
Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Baddest MoFo Lowdown ‘Round This Town Saturday Edition

Don’t Get Excited, but We Could Have an Agreement Here (Corrected and Updated)

Posted: 30 Jul 2011 08:40 PM PDT

Here we go.

ABC News is reporting tonight that Republicans have worked out a deal with the White House on a tentative debt ceiling agreement. The bullet points are:

Debt ceiling increase of up to $2.8 trillion
Spending cuts of roughly $1 trillion
Special committee to recommend cuts of $1.8 trillion (or whatever it takes to add up to the total of the debt ceiling increase)
Vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment
Committee must make recommendations before Thanksgiving recess
If Congress does not approve those cuts by late December, automatic across-the-board cuts go into effect, including cuts to Defense and Medicare.

A few thoughts. Mind you, I’m assuming that a few elements that have been in prior agreements will show up here. I’m also assuming that things won’t change, which is a very large assumption. If the situation changes, Michelle Malkin will have it as quickly as anyone, so check there.

GOOD:

1) No tax increases. Then again, tax increases came off the table several trial balloon agreements ago and only the President has seriously mentioned them in the past week. Then again, it’s possible that we could see tax increases in the committee recommendations. That devil still lies in the details.

2) The “cuts” at least equal the amount of the debt ceiling increase. One of the big problems with the first version of the Boehner plan is that his math was horrible and the cuts didn’t equal the ceiling rise.

3) It will pass the Senate. Probably. The President will sign it. Then again, I doubted that he would have vetoed any agreement that hit his desk based on his stellar record of keeping promises and taking hard decisions.

BAD:

1) These “cuts” are probably not real cuts. They are imaginary cuts to an imaginary and assumed yearly increase of the size of government called the baseline. Thanks to the way Congress has chosen to do business for a while now, increases are a built-in feature of the budget system and if a budget isn’t increases as much as projected, it’s scored as a “cut”. It’s bogus but it’s the way the system works and the GOP hasn’t really tried to change it yet. There’s a caveat. If the second tranch of 180 billion recommended by the committee goes against the budget and is also spread out over ten years, then those “cuts” will be cuts.

2) Assuming this deal is spread over 10 years like the other plans have been, we’re looking at a picayune amount of “cuts”. The average rate of increase from 2001-2011 was 6.1 percent. Based on the 2011 budget figure, a yearly “cut” of 100 billion a year comes to a bit less than 3 percent. The committee cuts would be critical. If they follow my caveat above, then they’d come out of real spending. The cuts wouldn’t be big — perhaps 2 percent at most — but they’d be a beginning. Still, the early plans Boehner offered were less than clear about how that second round of cuts would arrive.

3) Though this agreement reportedly contains a provision to allow for a vote for a Balanced Budget Amendment, it doesn’t require passage. That step back from the Boehner 3.0 deal, which did have a “passage provision”. I’m not quite sure why Congressional Republicans aren’t pushing harder for something over 70 percent of the American people, if this Gallup poll is to be believed. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers pushed a video from the GOP Labs to YouTube that is excellent on the BBA, but I didn’t see where others in the caucus followed up on it. I note again, though, this is an early report and the situation could change. In fact, it most likely will, but we’ll have to see.

CORRECTION: I changed the third “bad” bullet point to reflect that the potential agreement does allow a vote for the BBA. I hate working quickly, but at least it’s right now.

UPDATE: Stacy McCain and Ed Morrissey are all over the early reports as well. They’ll be excellent sources of late-breaking news, so make sure you check their sites as well. Check Ed’s post, in particular, for a slightly different variant on the agreement that moves the BBA much closer to reality.

Ezra Klein Has A Magic Solution to the Debt Ceiling “Crisis”, but the Politics Make Him Sad.

Posted: 30 Jul 2011 05:08 PM PDT

You may think you have plumbed the depths of idiocy in the debt ceiling debate, but you have not. I warn you, if you continue to read this post, you will come across an idea so stupid that it may well blast large parts of knowledge from your brain that you may not be able to recover. Dare you read on?

Well, okay, but in 20 minutes, when you suddenly realize you can no longer tie your shoes by yourself, don’t come whining to me. Or if you do, wear slip-ons so that you don’t trip over your loose shoelaces and hurt yourself.

Ezra Klein, professional JournoListy blogger employed by the Washington Post, has hit on what he believes is a workable way to raise the debt ceiling in a way that lets his Democratic ~~bosse~~s friends spend our money by the container ship-load without so much as a pause to reflect on the crippling debt we’re handing our children and grandchildren.

Here’s the rough outline of Klein’s scheme. We have laws that limit how much paper money we can circulate and how much coinage we can mint that is made from gold, silver, and copper. However, there is another law that allows the Treasury to mint platinum coins in any number and assign any value to them the Secretary of the Treasury sees fit. He needs no permission from anyone but the President, his boss, to do that. So, the plan would be to mint two platinum coins over which Tim Geithner would wave his Magic Wand of Treasuriness after which they would be worth one trillion dollars each. The Federal Reserve would give the coins to the Treasury, who would deposit them in their accounts and — hey presto! — we’ll have two trillion dollars to spend right away. No need to raise the debt limit, because this “money” wouldn’t be debt. It would be “real money” that the Obama administration could plow into more successful programs like the ~~Vote Buying Act~~ Stimulus Bill, Cash for Clunkers, or the auto maker bailouts.

Now, this would be completely legal but, as I’m sure you’re thinking as you attempt to keep sections of your brain from leaking out of your ears, there are a couple teeny tiny problems with this plan. Not to worry, though. Klein anticipated your concern.

The interesting thing about the platinum option, as it turns out, is that it actually seems to be on a firmer legal footing than the 14th Amendment approach. The law very clearly states that the Treasury Secretary can mint these platinum coins. He could even adorn them with the face of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) if he fancied. The trouble, of course, is the politics. Does Obama stage a press conference where he holds up the two large coins and announces what he's doing? It'd be hard to see how he could do that with a straight face. [Emphasis mine]

Yeah. Politics. That’s the trouble with this plan. There’s no way in the world our creditors might look a little bit askance at the creation of $2 trillion out of thin air and progressive unicorn dreams. The world couldn’t possibly notice that our President injected $2 trillion worth of pure, uncut inflation and devalued currency into our country rather than deal with a political problem that, at its heart, woulnd’t be difficult to resolve if he’d just do his job. The very notion that such a radical and dangerous maneuver taken to avoid real work might have a serious deleterious effect on our stock market is utterly unthinkable to Klein. Nope. The problem here is “the politics”.

But wait! That’s not the only problem Klein foresees. In addition to the “trouble” of selling the entire world on the sort of accounting trick that would make the Enron scandal look like a couple of kids swiping gum from the corner store, there’s one other wrinkle. Here’s Klein again.

There's also another headache that comes with all of these unorthodox debt-ceiling solutions. Back in March, recall, Congress passed a continuing resolution that essentially keeps the government funded until Sept. 30. Once September rolls around, it'll be time for yet another fight over appropriations.

What Klein does not tell you is that this “fight” exists only because his Democratic pals in the Senate have not passed a budget for over 815 days and, so far as we can tell, have no intention of passing one ever again. If Democrats had done their jobs, the “headache” in September would be essentially the same budget battle we have every year. Republicans and Democrats would squabble over how much bigger the government will get and, after an appropriate amount of posturing and preening, they’d settle on a figure somewhere between “a lot” and “a whole lot”.

That it, folks. That’s the other “headache” Klein envisions from a plan that would gut shoot our already moribund economy and shake a world financial market that’s still trying to figure out how it’ll stop the entire continent of Europe from going into hock.

Just remember, folks, the Washington Post is paying Ezra Klein an awful lot of money to write drivel like that. If there’s any justice in the world, he’ll soon find himself unemployed and in need of one of the jobs he and his left-wing buddies have destroyed by the millions over the past three years.

UPDATE: Dan Collins wants to see Hobbitses!!

Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Baddest MoFo Lowdown ‘Round This Town Saturday Edition

Posted: 30 Jul 2011 01:18 PM PDT

In a world where asking the President for his budget plan is a Republican talking point, encouraging your Twitter followers to spam your opponents then spamming then for four hours is a gimcrack PR maneuver. Note whose tweet is featured at the end of that article.

Who am I?

Who am I?

I can’t hear you!

Social media Shogun…of Harlem.

The stunt didn’t impress the President’s Twitter followers. He lost almost 40,000 of them yesterday, which is more than the number of jobs he “created or saved” all of last month. Fortunately, the MSM is still on his side and they’re not sparing the hyperbole in this fight. I guess when unchecked ~~bribery~~ government spending is on the line, you don’t want to leave any of your ammunition unfired.

And now, links!

Remember when the teachers unions flooded into Wisconsin and accused Governor Walker of being a heartless beast whose budget plan would lead to hundred, if not thousands, of unemployed teachers? Yeah, guess whose jobs have been saved by that same budget?
When did it become acceptable for an elected official to tell citizens to lie to the police? Of course, we’re talking about Baltimore, MD, one of the most woefully dysfunctional cities in the Unites States.
Thomas Friedman Hearts [Name of Repressive Totalitarian Regime Here].
Reverend C.L. Bryant is “returning to the plantation” to help free generations of Americans from the soft slavery of dependency and Nanny Government. He can use all the help we have to give.
My new favorite television show is Falling Skies which, as I’ve said before, virtually guarantees it won’t be on the air this time next year.
If you read nothing else this weekend, please take a few minutes to read this touching piece by my friend Beregond. Then, go leave this debt ceiling stupidity to the single-minded dunces who are going to do whatever the heck they want no matter what we say, and spend some quality time with the people you love.

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