Hold Onto Your Wallet — “Fiscal Cliff 2.0″ is Coming Soon

[G_j]

http://billmoyers.com/2013/08/28/hold-onto-your-wallet-fiscal-cliff-2-0-is-coming-soon/

Hold Onto Your Wallet — “Fiscal Cliff 2.0″ is Coming Soon
August 28, 2013
by Joshua Holland

With news that the federal government will hit the “debt ceiling” in mid-October rather than in December, as had been previously predicted, we’re headed toward another contrived “fiscal cliff” crisis. Hold onto your wallet.

Barack Obama has made it clear that he won’t negotiate with congressional Republicans over the debt limit. But because it will now be reached just a couple of weeks after the deadline for a budget resolution at the end of September, that’s only going to be technically correct. As Kevin Drum put it, “everyone’s going to get mighty hazy mighty fast about what exactly is being negotiated.” This is precisely what happened last winter leading up to January’s fiscal cliff deal (which resulted in a tax hike on working people and enough economy-slowing “austerity” to cut growth forecasts significantly).

House Majority Leader John Boehner, (R-OH), promises a “whale of a fight” over the debt limit, now to be wrapped up in the budget fight. While the Republican establishment appears to have backed away from activists’ surreal demand that Democrats kill off Obamacare in order to raise the debt limit, they will ask for other concessions. And Obama has consistently said that he’d entertain some “Grand Bargain,” which might include cuts to Social Security benefits. At the very least, Boehner is going to demand another round of deep spending cuts at a time when those resulting from previous budget battles are already holding back the economy. Economist Dean Baker notes that “government spending as a share of GDP is lower in 2013 than it was in every year of the Reagan presidency except 1988,” and estimates that the sequester and other “austerity” measures enacted in the past 3 years have translated into five million fewer American jobs.

These debt limit “shenanigans” aren’t very democratic, and Boehner admitted as much, telling the Idaho Statesman, “It may be unfair but what I’m trying to do here is to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would produce if left to its own devices.” In other words, he’s going to hold the global economy hostage for policies his conservative allies couldn’t achieve through the electoral process.

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[Supersedeas]

1. haven't we seen this comedy before

[Negativity]

2. I'm just curious

That if we start bombing on Syria won't it bring the fiscal cliff closer than mid-October? Was just a thought.

[BainsBane]

3. I thought we'd already gone off the cliff?

Or is this the next vote on raising the debt ceiling?