I haven’t written about the “fiscal cliff” fiasco because I think the whole thing is stupid. Not only does it show that Congress cannot function, but the press’s coverage of it has been awful. They treat the “cliff”–stupid name, by the way–like it’s some kind of unstoppable evil that unexpectedly appeared before us, when in fact it is just the already-known, logical results of acts of Congress.
You may ask: why did Congress pass acts that include provisions so terrible the mere prospect of them going into effect has set everyone into a panic? I don’t know. I’m no legal or legislative expert, but I think this all suggests a lack of foresight on the part of our elected officials. But I haven’t seen a lot of press covering that aspect of the story. They seem mostly focused on the endless fighting between the parties preventing them from fixing the problem–which is certainly worth covering in its own right–but I think people also ought to consider just how this all came about in the first place.
The short version of why they passed the law with all these dire threats is that it was a last minute bill to prevent our first ever sovereign default, which very nearly happened because some members of Congress politicized raising the debt ceiling, also for the first time ever. It’s a delusion of ideological purity, extremely short-sighted.
The short version of why they passed the law with all these dire threats is that it was a last minute bill to prevent our first ever sovereign default, which very nearly happened because some members of Congress politicized raising the debt ceiling, also for the first time ever. It’s a delusion of ideological purity, extremely short-sighted.
Here are the relevant wiki pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_fiscal_cliff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_Control_Act_of_2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_debt-ceiling_crisis
Thank you much for the links. Very informative.