Albert Mohler weighs-in on the debt-ceiling debate that is about to unfold:
Conservatives should be particularly unwilling to participate in such a charade, and yet many do so, thinking they can use the pseudo-event to their advantage. It is a losing game, dishonest politics, and a failure of governance…
Conservatives should just point out that the Constitution demands that the nation pay its debts, and that Congress and the President must take responsibility for the spending — and the massive borrowing — that their actions mandate. Conservatives should point to the real crisis, stand on principle, and refuse to distract themselves and the American people with false crises and pseudo-events.
In the end pseudo-events only serve to make the problem worse, never better. We cannot deal with the real crisis, if we keep playing the game of the pseudo-event.
Read the rest here.
5 Comments
Patrick Duncan
I think Brooks and Mohler and oversimplifying things. For one, the debt limits are in place because previous leaders said, “there’s little chance our debt will ever get to this level, but in case it does, we need to put this limit in place to prevent out of control spending”. It’s really no different than what your bank does when it sets a limit for your credit or mine.
We need these limits in place to serve as warning signs to both our leaders and the American people to see that we are running past one red light after another.
Mohler is also wrong when he asserts that this is about paying for past spending. It isn’t! It’s about future spending and a trajectory that has to be changed if we want to avert a crisis – just the same as if you were requesting a credit increase from your bank or credit card company. If you requested a credit increase after blowing through one credit limit after another, you better believe your bank would ask for more concessions and an actual plan to get your future debts covered, not to mention your past debts.
James Stanton
I think Mohler is half right. It’s about paying for past spending and making sure we control future spending. Most of the policy elite on the right want to use the built up debt as an excuse to cut future spending of social safety net programs.
Future tax cuts without corresponding cuts in spending as well as future wars of choice will only add to the debt. Yet, we see few on the right addressing that these have helped create our current debt and we should be wary of repeating such policies.
Congress has already authorized the current spending levels. Let Congress propose either to lift the debt ceiling or propose a balanced package to reduce the debt. As long as Republicans continue to support corporate welfare and unlimited spending for the War Department they should not be taken seriously as fiscal conservatives.
Patrick Duncan
It is in part about paying for past spending – HOWEVER, it is not about whether or not we’ll pay for past spending, but how and when. Those are important questions and some people are framing our past spending in the wrong way, particularly those who want spending to continue down the path we’re on.
Don Johnson
Pro 22:7 The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.
On the trillion dollar coin, why not just make 15 of them and pay off the US debts? Wheeeeeeeeee!
Scott McCauley
These events, pseudo or real, raise public awareness of what Mohler identifies as the “real problem”. That’s a good thing. The supposed solutions that come out of these events have never been “real solutions”; that is true. But that doesn’t make it wrong to use these events to raise awareness.