By Chandrashekar (Chandra) Tamirisa, (On Twitter) @c_tamirisa
The United States House of Representatives voted in favor of the budget deal with the majority vote of 269-161 coming from the majority Republicans. As Republicans well know, ‘on the house’ to too many customers can drive any business bankrupt. The tabs, when they keep on piling up, if not paid, can shut down the bar, leaving both patrons and owners high and dry.
More interesting is the politics of the vote, because the Legislative and the Executive are about politics. The president is up for reelection and the country is up for renewal. The government has no money and so don’t many Americans.
The Republican party, obsessed with the possibility of amending the Constitution to balance the Federal budget, gave up spending discipline to get to their cherished outcome once they get elected after displacing a president who they believe is losing public support.
The first black man to get elected to the White House could prove to be a survivor. His deal is blessed by the Senate leaders of both parties. He is appearing to have lost the budget debate publicly to the Republicans by agreeing to spending cuts, which any politician knows are tentative in the course of electoral politics over a decade, while “angering” the liberals on the left. He got his $2.2 trillion in budget increases over the next 2 years while kicking the can down the road, no matter who his successor is.
The Republicans will be holding the bag come November 2012 in the public eye with a bad deal for themselves and the country (just as they did in 2008) because the president will blame them for the cuts and will move left like FDR to spend and expand the government in a “fierce urgency of now” as the economy comes grinding to a halt when people stop spending.
Obama would be reelected. The people will have little choice but to accept the safety of a government that is better because it is bigger by their own debt, their children’s debt and taxes, and plenty of political apathy having been squeezed by chronic unemployment and economic uncertainty.
After all, there are more Democrats than Republicans in the country since Woodrow Wilson about 100 years ago. The world could be a more protectionist EuAmerica co-existing with the rest of the mixed economies which like both the government and the markets in about the same ratio and proportion as in Brazil and India.
China and Russia may get there also as the world equilibrates around socialism, the last man standing after the lifting of the iron curtain.
More (government), however, need not always be better.
