Sunday Morning Non-Book Open Thread

As I was getting ready to watch a parade of leftists and the MFM (BIRM) on the Sunday shows blame the S&P downgrade on everyone but the actual parties responsible, I went back and refreshed my memory of the timeline.

• February 14 - President Obama releases his FY12 budget. While making the usual false claims about "responsibility" and "shared sacrifice", this budget did nothing to address our long term fiscal problems. This is the budget that would ultimately be rejected 97-0 in the senate.
• April 5 - The House GOP "Path to Prosperity" budget is released and met with howls from the left.
• April 13 - Obama gives that awful, partisan speech castigating Paul Ryan and the House budget plan. A sample:

  [The House GOP plan] is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.

• April 15 - Jay Carney, in reiterating the administration's call for a "clean" debt limit increase, said it is "imperative" that a debt-limit vote not be "held hostage to any other action, because of the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling."
• April 18 - Standard & Poor's warns of a potential downgrade stating, in part:

  We view President Obama's and Congressman Ryan's proposals as the starting point of a process aimed at broader engagement, which could result in substantial and lasting U.S. government fiscal consolidation. That said, we see the path to agreement as challenging because the gap between the parties remains wide. We believe there is a significant risk that Congressional negotiations could result in no agreement on a medium-term fiscal strategy until after the fall 2012 Congressional and Presidential elections. If so, the first budget proposal that could include related measures would be Budget 2014 (for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2013), and we believe a delay beyond that time is possible.

  Standard & Poor's takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures the Congress and the Administration might conclude are appropriate. But for any plan to be credible, we believe that it would need to secure support from a cross-section of leaders in both political parties.



• July 19 - The House passed the "Cap, Cut and Balance" act (CCB) and sends it to the Senate where it is tabled. CCB is the only legislation ever introduced in this process that may have prevented S&P from downgrading US sovereign debt.

So as you can see, the downgrade was clearly due to GOP intransigence, especially the tea party caucus in the House. I don't think I even need to watch the Sunday shows now.

Related: Another good timeline from Rosetta over at The Hostages.

posted by Andy at 08:30 AM

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