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Before the election, right-wing leadership in both the House and Senate declared their intentions to hold the debt ceiling hostage to demand cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits.
This would be a disaster. Failure to increase the debt ceiling would wreck the global economy, producing a recession or even depression, and would weaken America’s standing in the world.
Failure to increase the debt ceiling would not do anything to limit future spending, it would simply force the U.S. Treasury to default on its existing bonds.
Why is the new right-wing House majority making this threat? Because they have spent nearly a century resenting that Social Security works. It is a model of a simple, universal, and overwhelmingly popular government program. Our Social Security system puts the lie to Wall Street’s insistence that private corporations are more efficient than what we can do together.
Social Security and Medicare are overwhelmingly popular. So while Wall Street has wanted for decades to cut, privatize, or otherwise destroy them, they have never been able to overcome the significant popular backlash to those cuts. That’s why they’ve hidden behind fast-tracked commissions, committees, and processes like the one Mitt Romney proposed in his TRUST Act. They want to cut Social Security behind closed doors, without their fingerprints.
President Barack Obama attempted to negotiate with Republicans in order to raise the debt ceiling in 2011. Those negotiations yielded an agreement that prolonged the Great Recession, led to the downgrading of the United States’ credit rating, and nearly resulted in cuts to Social Security and Medicare. America is a democracy; we should not allow government-by-hostage-crisis to become routine.
