Debt Ceiling Extortion Is an Attack on Democracy If Republicans want to cut spending, they should
Debt Ceiling Extortion Is an Attack on Democracy If Republicans want to cut spending, they should win an election and do it themselves.
By Jonathan Chait@jonathanchait
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/debt-ceiling-extortion-is-an-attack-on-democracy.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=One%20Great%20Story%20-%20January%2023%2C%202023&utm_term=Subscription%20List%20-%20One%20Great%20Story
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One column in The Wall Street Journal proposes Republicans require cuts to domestic spending while “leaving Democrats to designate what nonmilitary programs to cut.” This seems to get the closest to the party’s desire: to slash domestic spending while making the Democrats politically responsible for it. The purpose of this strangely elliptical hostage standoff is to negate the basic democratic function of allowing voters to assess the policy choices of their elected officials. Republicans desperately want Democrats to be liable for their own unpopular decisions.
Republican spending hawks sometimes complain about their party’s refusal to follow through on fiscal discipline when it holds power. But the availability of debt-ceiling hostage-taking creates a moral hazard enabling this behavior. Republican presidents can lavish the rich with tax cuts without taking responsibility for the trade-offs, believing they can always extort the cuts out of Democrats later.
The Republican penchant for extortion methods is a natural consequence of the party’s elite’s deeply unpopular fiscal-policy agenda. Unlike the mainstream center-right parties throughout the democratic world, all of which accepted the postwar welfare state, the Republican Party has never truly come to terms with the legitimacy of the New Deal. They consider the Democrats’ defense of entitlement programs “demagoguery,” and they consider progressive taxation little better than mob rule, likening it with revealing frequency to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews.
The conservative movement’s refusal to accommodate the public’s preference for a welfare state financed by progressive taxation has made it a fertile ground for authoritarianism. Trump is just one manifestation of this desire by Republican elites to get around the public’s refusal to endorse their core economic-policy commitments. Their regular use of hostage threats is another.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
should tell reQublicOns go to hell, there will be no negotiations on cutting any social programs.
We're gonna raise taxes on the rich like other countries do and pay off the deficit. 
