The concessions Republican House Speaker John Boehner has had to make to get his party’s far-right tea party wing to pass a meaningless bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling is emblematic of the craziness surrounding what has become a huge and damaging crisis of confidence in the U.S. dollar, in America’s political stability, and this nation’s good faith and credit. But that is just the tip of the iceberg headed toward the Tuesday deadline.
What is really at stake is the very foundation of the fairness, ideals and values long held in America with respect to our vast majority of working families, who depend heavily on their hard-earned entitlement programs and the flat-lined, modest (15 percent) of federal spending that supports discretionary support for everything from farm crops to Pell grants.
At the most fundamental level, what tea party members are demanding — and holding our nation’s economy and good faith and credit hostage for — comes down to things like this:
• Cutting Pell grants for low-income students to attend college, in return for keeping the Bush tax cuts intact for multimillionaires and billionaires.
• Making measly voucher programs out of bedrock, pre-paid Social Security and Medicare, in return for keeping tax breaks for oil companies, and personal taxes for zillionaire hedge fund managers at a lower percentage rate than what their secretaries pay.