Friday, January 04, 2013
Krugman is still nervous
After the 'victory' of the "fiscal cliff", Paul Krugman is still concerned about the future Republican assaults on the government.
According to the normal rules of politics, Republicans should have very little bargaining power at this point. With Democrats holding the White House and the Senate, the G.O.P. can’t pass legislation; and since the biggest progressive policy priority of recent years, health reform, is already law, Republicans wouldn’t seem to have many bargaining chips.It's not what he gets, yet but how he gets there that scares PK. And with our President's prediliction for sacrificing the hard work of millions of Americans contributions to Social Security & Medicare to appease a bunch of anarchist terrorists, he may have very good reason to be nervous.
But the G.O.P. retains the power to destroy, in particular by refusing to raise the debt limit — which could cause a financial crisis. And Republicans have made it clear that they plan to use their destructive power to extract major policy concessions.
Now, the president has said that he won’t negotiate on that basis, and rightly so. Threatening to hurt tens of millions of innocent victims unless you get your way — which is what the G.O.P. strategy boils down to — shouldn’t be treated as a legitimate political tactic.
But will Mr. Obama stick to his anti-blackmail position as the moment of truth approaches? He blinked during the 2011 debt limit confrontation. And the last few days of the fiscal cliff negotiations were also marked by a clear unwillingness on his part to let the deadline expire. Since the consequences of a missed deadline on the debt limit would potentially be much worse, this bodes ill for administration resolve in the clinch.
So, as I said, in a tactical sense the fiscal cliff ended in a modest victory for the White House. But that victory could all too easily turn into defeat in just a few weeks.
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In 19th-century Russia, today's Teahadists would have been called 'Nihilists'. They were bombthrowers and assassins. Dostoevsky wrote a classic novel--The Possessed--about these devilish folks.
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