Voting on the Debt: The Tea Party's Jihad

With the approval of the budget cuts they imposed on the White House, the Republicans are playing against America and forcing their country to restrain itself until the 2012 elections.

The White House and the Congress reached an agreement on the debt Sunday night in order to avoid defaulting.

In 2008, in the months following his election, Obama said that he was probably like a Rorschach test, an exercise which is quite popular among psychologists. In such a test, the patient is asked to freely interpret the blot left by a spot of ink on a sheet of white paper in his or her own way, according to what the patient feels or perceives. The metaphor was never as justified as it was after the sequence of events in which the President of the United States just managed — by the skin of his teeth — to rescue his budget and prevent his country from being declared bankrupt. For the day after the fateful deadline of August 2, whether you were a Republican or a Democrat, a financier or an industrial, whether you belonged to the wealthiest classes or to the middle classes, you thought that Obama had given in on the main thing. And that he had to disguise his “big government” ideas, or that he tricked the Republicans and prevented the tea party’s free-market anarchy from halting the social program upon which he was elected.

Of course, this knife fight between a majority Republican House of Representatives and a Senate filled with Democrats has given a glimpse of what the 2012 presidential campaign will be like. But is it, this very political tussle, which really counts? What matters for America, given its power and influence on the world economy, is to know if the spending cuts mandated by the agreement between Congress and the White House — all spending, including military — are not going to affect the already sluggish growth: 0.8 percent in the first half.

Suicidal Ideology

In an editorial for the New York Times, Joe Nocera, quoting an expert from an investment firm, explained that economics “includes both a numerator and a denominator.” The numerator is debt, but the denominator is growth. The problem, he added, is that “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator. Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.”

In fact, it was the stock market which, as often happens in the United States, provided the true measure of what was happening this week, and which the entire world greeted with cowardly relief. Yet, the market was in an overall fall. The glass is, therefore, more likely half-empty than half-full. Even if they haven’t completely won their war, the Republicans — who are increasingly endorsing the tea party’s radical ideas — have won this battle: In order to reduce the debt, taxes will not be raised for the most wealthy, but rather, as they planned, social programs — especially for the middle class — will be amputated. One commentator went so far as to suggest that this process of undermining — and nearly destroying — the world’s confidence in American power is a new form of jihad. A holy war launched this time not by faraway fanatics, but by good Americans misguided by an ideology which may prove suicidal for the United States.