As the above charts from the
National Journal show, the public is pretty disgusted with the debt ceiling debate that just ended in Washington. I can't blame them. If this is the kind of politics we can expect from Washington nowdays, then this nation is in a lot of trouble.
Regarding the last question ("In the debate over whether to raise the federal debt ceiling, who do you believe has behaved more responsibly?"), I find the results particularly ining for two reasons:
ReplyDelete1) The question is framed as a debate between Republicans in Congress and President Obama - no mention of Democrats in Congress. How would that have changed the results?
2) It appears that the President's lack of engagement in this debate actually helped his ratings. It reminds me of the old adage I learned in the Army:
He who does a lot makes a lot of mistakes.
He who does little makes few mistakes.
He who does nothing make no mistakes.
He who makes no mistakes gets promoted (or, in this case, re-elected?).
You may not like how the Republicans have dealt with the debt problem; I'm not real crazy about it myself. But at least they've proposed something tangible, something that can be scored by the CBO. Vague references to tax increases, using euphemisms like "revenue enhancement," do nothing to solve the problem.
In December 2010, when the Democrats had a majority in both houses, they could have raised the debt ceiling with a clean vote. Why didn't they? Did they want the GOP to share the blame when the wheels started falling off?
It's been 825 days since the Democratic-controlled Senate has even proposed a budget, much less passed one. What's up with that?
This kind of benign neglect keeps everyone happy over the short term - until the money finally runs out.
Is Pritchard, Alabama the canary in the coal mine?
In 2003, an auditor cautioned the city government that they'd run out of funds by 2009 if they did nothing to fix the problem. That's exactly what they did, and as a result, they stopped paying pensions in September of 2009.