Thursday, July 14, 2011

Radical and Deeply Irresponsible


Noman gets his daily assault on personal tranquility from the news as always.  It's simply that he's been too stressed with teaching to set his thoughts down for public consumption.  Nevertheless, the extremely common-sensical, even if somewhat flamboyant, Sarah Palin has given Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner a chance to provoke Noman into comment, stress or no.

Ms. Palin said the U.S. cannot default on its debt and that  the debt limit will eventually be raised, but she said the U.S. would have not have to default if Congress does not raise the country’s borrowing limit by Aug. 2, the date the Treasury has said the U.S. will no longer be able to pay its obligations with the current debt limit.
“I’m still not one to buy into this notion that we must incur more debt, [that] we must increase the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, otherwise there will be catastrophe,” she said. “You prioritize…you pay for the essentials first and then the nonessentials have to get cut.”
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has called such a move “a radical and deeply irresponsible departure” from past practice. 
Let's see.  To pay for the essentials first, and then cut the nonessentials is a "radical and deeply irresponsible departure from past practice."  Presumably, past practice is to be hallowed and revered now that the counter culture has become the status quo and replaced all received understandings and institutions with its own creations.  That's against the way we've always done things, says Tim Geithner without a hint of irony.  The steady and highly responsible thing to do now is to keep on borrowing in a radical and deeply irresponsible manner.   How else might the Democratic party's constituents feed at the public trough?  And, after all, that's the important matter for a Treasury Secretary to concern himself with, isn't it?