House puts off debt vote as press by Boehner fails

Today, Friday 29 July, marks four days before the United States runs out of money and defaults on its debt, i.e. quits paying its bills. Most economists agree this will lead to calamity. Anyone observing from planet Vulcan might thus deem it likely that our Congress will raise the debt ceiling. Those of us here on Earth shake our heads knowingly, as we did when Kate Winslet carried some newfangled art by Picasso on board the Titanic. Billy Zane then mocked her vulgar tastes. “Little does he he know!” we tsked.

Anyone familiar with the 112th Congress can chuckle similarly at the idea that it even hopes anymore to stave off disaster. It seems now that if legislators raise the debt ceiling at all, they’ll do so only if the increase accompanies massive cuts in entitlement programs including Social Security, which is in surplus. Journalists have offered many silly analogies to explain this brinksmanship, some farfetched and others apt. Let me try my hand at one.

The economy is the Titanic. The debt ceiling is the iceberg, sighted way in advance. Democrats have devised a plan to sideswipe the iceberg so that it would graze the sick-bay cabins, whereas Republicans have decided to create a black hole at the center of the earth that will swallow the galaxy and kill every living thing.

Team Titanic.

In case that’s too abstract, I’ll try to summarize where we stand. A majority of voters want the debt ceiling raised, want to preserve Social Security and Medicare, want to decrease defense spending. On defense we spend north of one trillion per year, while Social Security is in surplus. A bipartisan Congressional majority ignores that surplus, calls the program unsustainable, plans to slash it. Our effective corporate tax rate is five percent. Individual taxes are lower than they’ve been in generations. The rich don’t pay Social Security tax on most of their income.

I hate to mix metaphors, but to say default will send us into a meltdown that will snowball into an avalanche still makes more sense than the contrasting facts above.

You can turn anywhere for examples of the absurdity of Tea Party nonsense this week about the budget. Here’s one: for some House conservatives, the dealbreaker in Boehner’s debt-ceiling compromise bill is that it “includes $17 billion in supplemental spending for Pell Grants.” You see, “some House Republicans think of [Pell Grants] as being akin to welfare.”

Leave aside that Pell Grants aren’t; leave aside that if they were, corn subsidies and the mortgage interest deduction and the $35 billion we gave in loans to the Arab Banking Corporation of Bahrain would also have relatives. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend Pell Grant recipients are lazy drug-addled wastoids who attend college only because dorms provide storage for their welfare babies. If that were true, would it be irksome enough to justify destroying the world economy?

The 112th Congress wants to obliterate our social safety net. The Republicans in power dream of a world where no public help remains for the sick and the poor. That world is within their grasp, which is why they refuse to compromise. It’s why, when Obama’s “compromise” offers them $3 trillion in entitlement cuts and just $1 trillion in new revenue, in the form of a tiny tax on only the wealthiest Americans, they just scoff. And it’s why their arguments seem illogical and moronic to people who assume they’re arguing in good faith.

Such people might protest that cutting Social Security to solve budget woes is senseless and outrageous when the Social Security surplus is $2.6 trillion dollars. Such people might suggest alternate cuts: for example, the War on Drugs costs $15 billion a year, and corn ethanol subsidies cost $7 billion, and letting Google move its money via the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” costs a little bit and the wars we’re fighting in five foreign countries aren’t free. These protestations are futile.

Volunteers of America Soup Kitchen, 1936.

Congressional Republicans already understand the logic. They don’t care. They know what they’re doing: destroying middle-class America, because the rich don’t need middle-class America anymore, just as tobacco companies don’t need American smokers anymore, because there are new smokers in other countries. Of course, when I say “They know what they’re doing,” I don’t mean to suggest what they’re doing is sane.

If the insanity results in another Great Depression, the economic woes may be just the beginning. The original Great Depression didn’t exactly promote long-term geopolitical stability. So I do hope I’m wrong when I say House Republicans will be hoist with their own petard when a meltdown leads to the biggest destruction of wealth the globe has ever seen. Here’s hoping we look back and laugh at the egg on my face. I fear, however, that it will seem odd in 100 years to look back and see how legislators spent the last days of July 2011 fretting about Pell Grants.

Now and then I’ve encountered shadowy conspiracies which hold that the globe’s economy is controlled by the Bilderberg Society, the Trilateral Commission, the Masons, the Illuminati, and so on. Believers in such theories generally see those groups as evil overlords. I now find myself hoping their leaders are gathering in a room beneath the Swiss Alps to save us from ourselves.

“Yes but you’re supposed to be covering local news.”

I’m guessing Hampton Roads will be launched into the avant garde of the new economy when the military stops receiving paychecks.

Portsmouth man hoards snow to mark milestones

This story is instructive, because we’ll all need to learn to hoard more resourcefully after the coming collapse.

Virginia Democratic Party launches iPhone app

No longer must you be home or in the office to read about the Democrats’ spinelessness or treachery (take your pick); you can do it now in the bathroom or while stopped at red lights.

Whole Foods Market coming to Va. Beach

I’m not one to spend time praying; if I thought praying accomplished anything, I’d have prayed about the debt ceiling instead of writing this column. But there’s one thing I’ve wanted so badly that despite the futility I’ve prayed for it nonstop for three years: a Whole Foods Market in Hampton Roads.

On Wednesday Whole Foods announced that they’ve signed a lease “to put a store on the former Saturn dealership property on Laskin Road” in Virginia Beach. I would conclude that praying works after all, except that the store won’t open until late 2013, by which time those left alive will be foraging for scraps of radioactive trash.

McDonnell considered as VP candidate

Mitt Romney, who last time I checked hasn’t won any primaries, announced his “short list for vice president” this week at a Virginia Beach fundraiser where Pat Robertson was in attendance. Robertson didn’t make the shortlist, but our governor did, and in response the national media deemed this to be news.

Governor says he wants more changes in K-12 education

Moving on up? (Pic | Gage Skidmore)

This Times-Dispatch story gives no info on what the changes might be, because “a spokesman for McDonnell would not give details.” The article does reveal that McDonnell will try harder next year to take state pension plans away.

Va. offers grants to revitalize abandoned buildings

The governor has announced “$3 million in structural revitalization grants available to towns, cities or counties to help fund revitalization of derelict commercial or industrial buildings,” which I would support if he didn’t mean to help pay for it by taking state pension plans away.

Head of state’s Medicaid agency quits after year on job

No word on whether this story connects to the one I covered last week on right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe’s latest prostitution-obsessed antics in a Richmond Medicaid office. O’Keefe’s website posted video of a Medicaid employee giving some questionable advice; Attorney General Cuccinelli responded by saying he’ll investigate.

I regret to have caused confusion by sarcastically praising Cuccinelli for investigating O’Keefe. Of course it’s Medicaid, not O’Keefe, that Cuccinelli wants to take down. According to theWashington Post: “Cuccinelli’s health care fraud unit [has] urged the commission to endorse legislation making Medicaid fraud investigators sworn law enforcement officers with authority to execute search warrants and carry weapons.” My sincere apologies to anyone who thought I was saying nice things last week about Cuccinelli.

Virginia Beach mayor to meet with cyclists about proposed bike path

Adding this proposed bike path to several miles of Shore Drive would be a good start to adding bike paths on every road in the region. Then again, after the apocalypse every road will be a de facto bike path anyway.