Progressive Opinion

truthdig.com — In the affairs of nations, Alexander Hamilton wrote in January 1790, “loans in times of public danger, especially from foreign war, are found an indispensable resource.” It was his first report as secretary of the treasury to the new Congress of the United States. The country had borrowed to fight the Revolutionary War, and Hamilton proposed a system of public debt to pay those loans. The history of the U.S. national debt is inexorably tied to its many wars. The resolution this week of the so-called debt ceiling crisis is no different. Not only did a compliant Congress agree to fund President George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with emergency appropriations; it did so with borrowed money, raising the debt ceiling 10 times since 2001 without quibbling. So how did the Pentagon fare in the current budget battle? It looks like it did fine. Not to be confused with the soldiers and veterans who have fought these wars.

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consortiumnews.com — What are we to make of the Obama-brokered deal on debt and spending? I am reminded of a sermon that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave during the turbulent 1950s, in which he peered into the future and issued a prescient warning: “A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.” In promoting and then signing the so-called “deficit reduction” legislation, President Barack Obama has definitively confirmed that he stands in the ranks of those spiritual-death-dealing, “soft-minded” men about whom Dr. King warned so ominously. In my view, even dyed-in-the-wool Obama supporters will now have to let the scales fall from their eyes. The new one-sided “compromise” so clearly promotes the interests of the wealthy over those of the poor that, in Biblical terms, it can readily be seen as a Goddamned deal.

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economix.blogs.nytimes.com — Some House and Senate Republicans have pushed hard to include a “balanced budget” constitutional amendment as part of any agreement on a debt ceiling, and the final accord — passed Monday by the House of Representatives and awaiting action by the Senate — identified such an amendment as one path to the bill’s deficit-cutting provisions. Its supporters say such an amendment is a way to keep spending and deficits under control by requiring that federal spending not exceed revenues. But there are three main problems with this potential approach as it is currently articulated.

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ft.com — Those responsible for America’s multi-month debt ceiling debacle deserve, at best, an “incomplete”. They could even merit a “fail” grade if both the process and outcome inflict the type of damage to America and the global system that I suspect they will. It is discouraging that several months of disruptive political bickering and posturing failed to deliver a well-defined medium-term fiscal reform effort. Instead, the legislation signed into law by president Obama on Tuesday is terribly unbalanced in design, lacks proper operational details, and leaves key issues to at least one more round of political brinkmanship. This incomplete endeavour could be dismissed as business as usual in Washington except for one important consideration: it materially darkens an already fragile outlook for economic growth and job creation.

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newdeal20.org — The debt ceiling debate has finally come to a close. We are clearly all better off in a country that doesn’t default on its debt because of self constraints and intense partisan bickering. But the deal that was struck and signed into law by President Obama that averted the default will have painful repercussions for many of the less well off and vulnerable. It calls for $2.4 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, as well the creation of a bipartisan Congressional committee that will be charged with proposing another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. This is in exchange for a two-step increase in the debt ceiling, averting the chaos of a U.S. default. These cuts will harm many groups, but there are a number of ways they’ll hurt women specifically.

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salon.com — The president and his team believe that presiding over this not-so-grand but apocalypse-averting deal sets him up well for re-election in 2012. The Obama team has always believed the president's fate rests with independents, who they think value compromise over partisan grandstanding. But the president's approval rating with independents has dropped 16 points in the last few months, to an 36 percent. Only 31 percent of independents now say they would vote to re-elect Obama, compared to 39 percent who'd say they'd support a generic Republican. Obama is mistaken to hitch his re-election wagon to their political dreams.

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thenation.com — The die has been cast. Obama’s “nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists,” as an editorial in the normally sedate New York Times described the deal to raise the debt ceiling, is a disaster in the making. It rules out a vigorous government response to the persistent economic stagnation in which joblessness, housing foreclosures and an ever-widening gap between the top 2 percent and the rest of Americans have become the norm. But to use the word “capitulation” is too kind, since this president, as was Bill Clinton before him, is clearly one of those “New Democrats” who welcomes the opportunity to jettison the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as outmoded political baggage. Otherwise, why would Obama have reached for a “grand bargain” in which he even put Social Security and Medicare cuts on the table before the Republicans rolled him?

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truth-out.org — By gollies, America's workaday majority of middle-class and poor people have a fighter on our side in Washington. Unfortunately, that fighter is Barack Obama. On Sunday, he waved his white hankie of surrender in the debt ceiling battle, agreeing to a disastrous deal ruthlessly pushed by the loopiest of the tea party extremists in the Republican House. It slashes some nearly $1 trillion from national programs that ordinary Americans count on, puts Social Security and Medicare at risk, and promises to make our depressed economy, and even the deficit, worse. Obama also cravenly conceded to the GOP demand that the fortunate few at the top of our economy make no sacrifice. Not to worry, though, our champ said as he signed his abject capitulation into law. Stage two the deficit reduction process will be better. Then the privileged few will have to "chip in," reassuring all who will be harmed by this week's deal that he'll be "fighting for" fundamental principles of fairness in the next one.

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tnr.com — Grover Norquist is always filled with triumphalist theories, and his book elucidates one favorite Norquist claim, that shrinking revenue will turn the Democratic coalition against itself in a cannibalistic orgy. The debt ceiling bill fulfilled the right-wing demand that absolutely not one penny of extra revenue be raised, and therefore contains significant defense cuts. In other words, the members of the conservative coalition looked around and decided to eat the defense hawks. The dynamic is going to get really interesting in the fall. That's when phase two begins. A bipartisan committee is tasked with reducing the deficit by $1.8 trillion, and if the committee's plan fails, huge automatic cuts to Medicare providers and defense will go into effect.

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huffingtonpost.com — So we won't default -- unless the extremist Tea Party gets its way. But we don't have a long-range fiscal plan, either, whatever the press releases say. Since the plan on the table is horrendous, that's a good thing. Indeed, the idea of detailed ten-year fiscal plan was, at its heart, absurd. (Ten years ago, the U.S. government was beginning to agonize about a burgeoning budget surplus.) Here's why the fiscal pathway laid out in the "Deficit Compromise" is not going to happen, regardless of what Congress does this week.

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