Poorest Nation on Earth

Reality and facts once again present challenges for Republicans and the fabricated fantasy land in which they live:

House Speaker John Boehner routinely offers this diagnosis of the U.S.’s fiscal condition: “We’re broke; Broke going on bankrupt,” he said in a Feb. 28 speech in Nashville.

Boehner’s assessment dominates a debate over the federal budget that could lead to a government shutdown. It is a widely shared view with just one flaw: It’s wrong.

“The U.S. government is not broke,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy for Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. “There’s no evidence that the market is treating the U.S. government like it’s broke.”

The U.S. today is able to borrow at historically low interest rates, paying 0.68 percent on a two-year note that it had to offer at 5.1 percent before the financial crisis began in 2007. Financial products that pay off if Uncle Sam defaults aren’t attracting unusual investor demand.

Yup...we're so broke that we can't pay our bills, and investors around the world frown upon us so greatly for being poor bastard deadbeats that they continue to view us as an AAA investment and accept record-low rates of return on Treasury securities. This is yet another example in the long line of bullshit served up by the Republicans, robotically embraced and repeated by the media, and the typical absolute failure by the Democrats to offer a competing vision other than a scaled back version of whatever the Republicans are demanding (i.e. agreeing that we must make budget cuts, but just smaller budget cuts than what the Republicans are proposing).

Steve Benen offers the following obvious comment, which is yet another truth that is never given the time of day:

And despite all of this, Republicans still say debt reduction is more important than economic growth, and are prepared to make unemployment worse, on purpose, because of their twisted priorities.

But if Boehner or his office were ever serious about defending the lie, perhaps the Speaker could explain why we're "broke" now, and not when he was adding $5 trillion to the debt during the Bush era. Is it just a coincidence that we're "broke" because we have a Democratic president who inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit from his Republican predecessor?

Duh - America isn't broke when you're doling out trillions of dollars in tax cuts to millionaires, fighting two endless wars on deficit spending, and a massive unfunded Medicare prescription giveaway to seniors (magically timed just before the 2004 election). I'm sure there are more than a few truly impoverished nations around the world that would love to have the problem of a $15 trillion economy.

I'm almost getting sick of writing about the budget/deficit, because it is just so damned incredibly stupid and wrong. And unfortunately, there's just probably no chance of it ever improving. Sure Chuck Schumer cited the NBC/WSJ poll that shows that Americans overwhelmingly support raising taxes on the wealthy, and sure a Democratic representative has introduced a bill raising taxes on millionaires, but giving lip service to a poll and actually passing progressive legislation are two entirely different matters. And with the GOP in control of the House with a sizable margin, you will simply never, ever see any legislation out of that chamber that includes any form of tax increase, unless it's on poor people or overpaid assholes that suck at the public teat and are ruining this country, like teachers and firefighters. It is heartening to see the Democrats actually introduce legislation that would seek to enact a progressive tax code, however. Even though it won't ever pass, measures like these are the first step in getting away from toeing the GOP line of doing nothing but cutting spending from trivial portions of the federal budget, and in actually presenting a coherent alternative.

But on the subject of our alleged poorhouse status, no one has come close to stating it better than Michael Moore:

America ain't broke! The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it's one person, one vote, and it's the thing the rich hate most about America -- because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!

This can not be repeated often enough.