The clown car that has been Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s speakership spluttered to a halting start over 15 long ballots in January and hasn’t had a second of a smooth ride since. From botched committee hearings to failed subcommittees to intra-leadership disputes, the House speaker’s tenure has been a kaleidoscope of incompetence. But McCarthy’s latest stumble is the most important, as it concerns the entire U.S. economy.
Last week, McCarthy finally introduced his debt ceiling bill, which would raise the limit by $1.5 trillion until March 31, 2024 — that is, not even for one year. In return, McCarthy and his supporters want to cut nondefense spending to fiscal year 2022 levels across-the-board (thereby allowing Republicans to claim ignorance of specific reductions). The few details we do have are headache-inducing: a rollback of increased IRS funding (which raises the deficit), a cancellation of President Biden’s student debt forgiveness program and an imposition of work requirements for Medicaid and other aid programs — which are neither effective nor necessary. (Prime-age employment is at its highest level in more than 20 years.)
To procrastinate while faced with such a crisis is malpractice.
The problem here isn’t the bill itself — even though it has the absence of substance you’d expect from today’s GOP. The problem is that the basic elements of what’s being requested in the bill have been public knowledge for months, and yet McCarthy and his team have dawdled on bringing it to the floor. And even after all this time, McCarthy is, once again, struggling to find the 218 votes he needs to pass the proposal. “The whip count on this is not good,” one senior Republican told Axios on Thursday.
There is no excuse for such negligence. A recent report from Moody’s Analytics projects that a prolonged default would cause an economic downturn “comparable to that suffered during the global financial crisis,” costing more than 7 million jobs and…
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