I Hate to Tell You This, But the Most Destructive Force on the Planet Is the GOP

What the Standoff Over the “Debt Limit” Really Means, And Why It Matters More Than You Think

Image Credit

Right about now, you might be wondering: what happens if the Republicans win their game of chicken over America’s debt limit? And who’s the game of chicken even against?

The answer to that question goes like this: the Republicans aren’t playing chicken. They’re playing Russian roulette. With the world. With the future of all of us. And there aren’t just three bullets in the gun, there are five. The stakes are…well…I don’t mean to be dramatic, but…they couldn’t be bigger.

Let’s start at the beginning, for a little bit of context. Every so often, America hits its “debt limit.” Now, the limit is often misunderstood. It’s not given by God, by the financial markets, or by economists. There aren’t legion of bankers sitting down and calculating a thing called a “debt limit.” The debt limit, or “ceiling,” is a Congressional agreement. In other words, a political construction. That’s crucial to understand. Because many people who don’t understand it think the debt limit is some kind of hard economic constraint, which, if you go a penny over, all hell will break loose in the world economy.

Wrong. The precise opposite is true.

Think of the, well, quality of America’s politicians. They’re not exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. There are some brave and noble ones, true, like, say Jamie Raskin, who lost a son, got cancer, and still fought with a seemingly bottomless reservoir of strength for democracy, helping lead the Jan 6th Committee. But then there are figures like, say, Rand Paul, who appears to have read a couple of economic pamphlets by places like the “Von Mises Institute” — sheer crackpottery — and is now the economic equivalent of Scalia, judicially, a fanatic, trying to impose his nutcase mythology on the rest of us.

So. To start at the beginning. The “debt limit” or “ceiling” is a fiction, a political construction — not some kind of actual economic thing-in-the-world. Now. That’s not to say that the world doesn’t have a debt problem, or even that America doesn’t. They do — but we’ll come back to that, because these aren’t remotely the same thing.

Now. Because the debt limit or ceiling is a political construction, and an economic fiction, guess what happens when Republicans win power? Each time they do, their “showdowns” over it, as the media likes to call them, get more ominous and fanatical, because that’s exactly the direction the GOP’s grown in. But these aren’t showdowns with, say, the other political side. This is gambling, recklessly, with the future of the world and throwing a match onto the rickey house of human civilization.

Why is that? Think about where the world is right now. It’s in dire shape. Don’t take it from me, take it from Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the UN:

“We are in the worst situation of my lifetime,” the 73-year-old U.N. chief told the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, and the corporate leaders gathered alongside politicians in the Swiss mountain-top retreat of Davos are far from blameless.

Guterres is one of a very, very few leaders we have worthy of the word. He doesn’t mince words or mess around. What else did he have to say? Try this on for size.

We learned last week that certain fossil fuel producers were fully aware in the 1970s that their core product was baking our planet. And just like the tobacco industry, they rode rough-shod over their own science. Big Oil peddled the Big Lie. Today, fossil fuel producers and their enablers are still racing to expand production, knowing full well that this business model is inconsistent with human survival. Now, this insanity belongs in science-fiction, yet we know the ecosystem meltdown is cold, hard scientific fact. Add to this toxic brew yet another combustible factor — conflict, violence, war.

He’s not done.

Every week brings a new climate horror story. Greenhouse gas emissions are at record levels and growing. The commitment to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees is nearly going up in smoke. Without further action, we are headed to a 2.8-degree increase.

The consequences, as we all know, would be devastating. Several parts of our planet would be uninhabitable. And for many, it would mean a death sentence.

Now. That’s not just penniless people in far-flung places that us rich Westerners, mostly, can ignore. Think of towns in Arizona running out of…water. Think of even the rich West’s rivers running dry and its crops failing. We are playing dice with the future of human civilization. Guterres is one of the very, very few leaders on this planet who gets it, and will say it out loud, even to the kinds of soulless beancounters that inhabit the alternate reality known as Davos.