Progressive Opinion

huffingtonpost.com — The debt ceiling fracas was an insanity-inducing syllabus of everything that's wrong with the American political system. Everything. Simply put: deficit reduction during a slow-growth recovery from an historically deep recession, with continued high unemployment and a housing market still in crisis, is just phenomenally stupid. When has deficit reduction ever stimulated economic growth during a difficult recovery, and especially considering the disturbing economic indicators we're experiencing today? Never. So regardless of the deal's content, this shouldn't have been an issue in the first place and we're all going to pay the price irrespective of political party or ideological affiliation. Here's how.

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nytimes.com — The Budget Control Act of 2011, which President Obama signed on Tuesday after Congress passed it by wide margins, is as contrived as the artificial crisis that spawned it. The bill, like a tired opera production, is full of clumsy staging and failed gimmicks left over from previous decades. It is not only bad policy in its goals of cutting spending too much, but it is bad procedure. It allows members of Congress to avoid responsibility for their actions through a cutout committee, a spending limit and the pretense that this Congress can tell the next one what to do.

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truth-out.org — The ongoing debate over the national deficit and the much fraught over debt default is staggering in how it has catered to conservative dogmas, in opposition to any progressive solution to the current impasse. Propagandists in the Democratic and Republican Party should be congratulated for their stunning achievement in these talks. They've managed to stand reality on its head, successfully framing the issue of corporate wealth as one of unfair and crippling "taxation," while portraying massive "cuts" in Social Security, Medicare, and other programs as a needed and shared "sacrifice." News flash to the American public: benefit cuts to Medicare and Social Security ARE a tax hike, even if Republicans and Democrats refuse to admit it. Any legislation that imposes increased costs on the public effectively amounts to a tax increase against the American people. We should reject the Orwellian "distinction" between "harmful tax hikes" and "necessary shared sacrifices" on the other.

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guardian.co.uk — After the midterm elections of 2010 put many Tea Partiers into high office, they then set about dragging the system rightwards. Ably assisted by a president who has fetishised compromise in the same way the Marquis De Sade liked a good spanking, they made positions that used to be considered rightwing into the middle ground. The only way for the left to fight back is to do the same to the Democratic party. Constantly rowing for the middle isn't working anymore. Not when the middle sits so far to the right. If liberals want to be relevant in the Democratic party, they need to start ousting traditional Democratic candidates in the primaries. Just as the Tea Party has done with the Republicans. They need to create a loud and clear voice that makes unreasonable demands and fights for them. In short, the president needs to be afraid of his left, not just of the right.

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huffingtonpost.com — The most terrifying result of the debt ceiling crisis is not the deal itself -- with its tight discretionary caps, its special joint committee that Republicans already are saying they won't allow to raise any revenues, and its potential for arbitrary across-the-board cuts. Instead, it's the precedent that Republican congressional leaders say the crisis has established. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared on the Senate floor today that this "creates an entirely new template for raising the national debt limit." As he explained on CNBC last night, "In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore."

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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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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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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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The debt ceiling deal hammered out by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders and passed in the House on Monday afternoon makes deep, painful, and lasting cuts throughout the federal government's budget. What's on the chopping block? The numbers tell the tale. The Obama-GOP plan cuts $917 billion in government spending over the next decade. Nearly $570 billion of that would come from what's called "non-defense discretionary spending." That's budget-speak for the pile of money the government invests in the nation's safety and future—education and job training, air traffic control, health research, border security, physical infrastructure, environmental and consumer protection, child care, nutrition, law enforcement, and more. more »