Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the nation’s credit rating gives House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan every right to say “I told you so.”
Even earlier this week when President Obama was taking his victory lap for the debt-ceiling compromise, Ryan was disclosing the cold, hard truths of the economic troubles that lie ahead — truths that a jittery Wall Street has been more than aware of.
In an oped column in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, the Wisconsin Republican reiterated, of course, that the president really has no budget plan. . . . The president knew then and knows now that his health care and welfare state agenda demand new and higher taxes, that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will continue to rise at unsustainable levels and that he has no plan for dealing with that.
In fact, when presented with options by his own debt commission appointees, Obama continued to be in denial.
How can you talk about priorities when you can’t even present a budget?
UPDATE: For whom the downgrade tolls. “The first reaction of the administration was not to blame the GOP, but to attack S&P’s math, as though a couple of trillion makes the difference in this context. My initial hypothesis was that the administration took this tack to try to scare the Moody’s and Fitch — the other major credit ratings agencies — away from following S&P into issuing downgrades. Certainly, there are real-world effects off a downgrade on interest rates, economic growth, and employment that would motivate the administration to this end. Upon further consideration, I would suggest the reactions against S&P have deeper ideological roots. . . . Perhaps in the future, community organizers will bus hoboes to chant outside the houses of credit agency employees. Or perhaps Big Labor will organize rallies on Wall Street to rail against the evil bond market. But such efforts will be largely futile. Moreover, the DNC and AARP are not going to waste money running issue advocacy ads against our creditors, even though it would be vaguely amusing to see them roll out actors dressed as aristocratic bond vigilantes for demonization. It might be easier to run ads attacking our largest creditor, China, but it is a fair bet that the PRC would not care all that much, either.”