Budget Battle Shows GOP's 'Madness'

One thing we’ve learned from the debt ceiling debate: Republicans are no longer behaving rationally. They’ve been revealed as a “dysfunctional” party “whose conservative wing is behaving less like a mainstream electoral force than an ultra-left sect being advised by a petulant 2-year-old,” writes Gary Younge in the Guardian. “It is simply not economically feasible to cut the US deficit without raising taxes.”

We got to this point through tax cuts, wars, and a financial crisis, and the GOP “aims to put the burden of these military follies and that economic mismanagement on the backs of those who have suffered the most from them: the poor.” President Obama has spoken of “Armageddon” if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, and indeed, the consequences would be dire: Interest rates could soar, the dollar could sink, and we could see “a sudden return to global slump.” “The four horsemen are saddling up, with Reagan's presumptive heirs ready to ride them into the sunset”—though it's worth noting that in 1987, it was Reagan himself who warned of the dangers of default. (More budget deficit stories.)