Barack Obama has achieved his goal of presiding over a humbler, more modest America.

From Gateway Pundit via Glenn Reynolds.

Rembrandt, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1635, National Gallery, London

Mark Steyn, in his customarily brilliant manner, reflects on the scope and significance of the federal debt.

The fecklessness of Washington is an existential threat not only to the solvency of the republic but to the entire global order. If Ireland goes under, it’s lights out on Galway Bay. When America goes under, it drags the rest of the developed world down with it. When I go around the country saying stuff like this, a lot of folks agree. Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, “Well, fortunately I won’t live to see it.” And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the ObamaCare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We’ve got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.

Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing — like when you get your MasterCard statement and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel combined.

When interest payments consume about 20 percent of federal revenues, that means a fifth of your taxes are entirely wasted. Pious celebrities often simper that they’d be willing to pay more in taxes for better government services. But a fifth of what you pay won’t be going to government services at all, unless by “government services” you mean the People’s Liberation Army of China, which will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers by about 2015. When the Visigoths laid siege to Rome in 408, the imperial Senate hastily bought off the barbarian king Alaric with 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 pounds of silver. But they didn’t budget for Roman taxpayers picking up the tab for the entire Visigoth military as a permanent feature of life.

Read the whole thing.

I think myself that Mark is overlooking the obvious detail: that when, as he puts it, “you get your MasterCard statement and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge,” before much longer you wind up stiffing all your credit cards and burning your credit rating for the next decade. The government equivalent of stiffing credit cards consists of inflating your currency, so you can pay your debts after all using funny money worth a small fraction of what it was at the time those debts were incurred.

The US Government has not overlooked this solution. Remember Quantitative Easing? It is already underway and in process. I’m not sure who it was that remarked “Inflation is the cruelest tax,” but he was clearly right. Inflation rewards the improvident and punishes the responsible. Inflation strips the middle class of its accumulated savings in order to relieve the government of its debt.

Reuters delivered the bad news.

The United States lost its top-tier AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor’s on Friday in an unprecedented blow to the world’s largest economy in the wake of a political battle that took the country to the brink of default.

S&P cut the long-term U.S. credit rating by one notch to AA-plus on concerns about the government’s budget deficit and rising debt burden. The action is likely to eventually raise borrowing costs for the American government, companies and consumers.

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Cornell Law Professor William A. Jacobson says:

Democrats own the downgrade. They fought Republicans and Tea Party supporters every step of they way, and forced a deal which was insufficient. They played class warfare and race politics against arguments that we needed to drastically change our spending habits.

This is Barack Obama and Harry Reid’s crowning achievement.

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Paul Krugman blames Tea Party Republicans.

[Y]es, it is the madness of the right: if not for the extremism of anti-tax Republicans, we would have no trouble reaching an agreement that would ensure long-run solvency.

Krugman then proceeds to argue that the S&P ratings agency has neither the right nor the authority to make ratings(!).

Another of the videos from Power-line’s contest. This one has rapidly attracted over 35,000 views.

Winner of a Power-Line contest.

A small businessman tells the DC political class where to get off.

From Bird Dog.

Fighting hobbits

“Tea party Republicans may be a noisy and effective protest movement, but they’re unfit to govern,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said at a news conference on Friday.

Speaker John Boehner’s task in working out a deal with Barack Obama and the democrat leadership of the Senate to avert a default crisis was made more difficult by 22 fiscally-irredentist Tea Party Republicans who refused to support his compromise solution.

John McCain made headlines by labeling the conservative extremists as “hobbits.”

I think “the hobbits” were wrong tactically and philosophically on insisting on trying to pass a balanced budget amendment. The democrats could never accept a balanced budget amendment. Their base and constituencies would never tolerate it. But, even more importantly, a balanced budget amendment is an unworkable idea which is constitutionally highly problematic.

Publius Huldah is quite right: a balanced budget amendment would strike directly at the concept of enumerated powers and it would effectively transfer decision-making authority from Congress to the courts.

The hobbits were wrong about the balanced budget amendment, but I think their hearts were in the right place and I still think they served a highly useful purpose in holding the GOP leaderships’ feet to the fire and restricting their ability to compromise too far elsewhere.

Mr. Boehner was enabled by their existence to go to Barack Obama and Harry Reid and say, “You know, guys, I’d like to compromise further and let you throw in some class-warfare taxes on the rich, but those crazy hobbits are fierce and fanatical. They’d never put up with any tax increases at all. I’d like to settle for more modest spending reductions, but Bandobras “Bullroarer” Took (R-VA) is insisting on blood.” It’s useful in negotiations to have a “Mr. Jones” you have to answer to, who is completely unreasonable and who is making maximalist demands.

Marc A. Thiessen contends that, in the end, in fact, the Tea Party hobbits did win.

The reported debt-limit deal appears to be a victory for the Tea Party. It includes around $1 trillion in spending cuts and creates a special committee of Congress to recommend cuts of $1.2 trillion more. If Congress does not approve those additional cuts by year’s end, automatic spending cuts go into effect. The package sets an important new precedent that debt-limit increases must be “paid for” with commensurate cuts in spending. According to Sen. Rob Portman, a former White House budget director, if we cut a dollar of spending for every dollar we raise the debt limit, we will balance the budget in 10 years — something that even the Paul Ryan budget would not achieve. And all this is accomplished with no tax increases. …

The Tea Party is also winning the battle of ideas. Last week, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod crowed that the debt-limit battle was shaping up as a “definitional fight” in which voters would see Obama as defending the reasonable center against Republicans who are “pandering to the extremes.” Well, if Axelrod is so confident that Obama is winning this “definitional fight,” why was the White House so adamant about ducking a second round next year? The president said that “the only bottom line that I have is that we extend this debt ceiling through the next election.” If he were winning the argument, he would have been eager to have this fight again just before the next election.

And Glenn Reynolds notes complacently: Well, you know the hobbits won in the original story too.

The fact that the Conservative Movement is large and diverse enough to have its own more extreme fringe is really a positive sign. Political coalitions large enough to win are never tidy, compact, perfectly ideologically pure, all neat and discreet. A successful political movement inevitably even attracts people you would just as soon not have on your own side along with all the opportunists who can tell which way the wind is blowing.

Charles Krauthammer, reflecting on the debt ceiling compromise, tells Fox News that the Tea Party Movement has done what it set out to do. It has changed the topic of America’s political debate.

Not so very long ago, at the time of his State of the Union address in January, Barack Obama was talking about more stimulus, “investment” in non-existent and uneconomic technologies, and the United States was firmly on the path to becoming another European-style welfare state. Looking back, Obama seems to be living in a different era. We are now in the period in which Americans recognize that government expansion and spending has gone too far, entitlements need to be rolled back, and the purposes and abilities of government re-evaluated. Obama has become a relic of the past, a fossil, and the Tea Party has been responsible.

Krauthammer, I think perfectly correctly views the still-pending-enactment debt bargain as a limited victory, but also as a turning point.

See the non-embeddable 2:01 video at Right Scoop.

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The same Charles Krauthammer had warned last Thursday:

I have every sympathy with the conservative counterrevolutionaries. Their containment of the Obama experiment has been remarkable. But reversal — rollback, in Cold War parlance — is simply not achievable until conservatives receive a mandate to govern from the White House.

Lincoln is reputed to have said: I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. I don’t know whether conservatives have God on their side (I keep getting sent to His voice mail), but I do know that they don’t have Kentucky — they don’t have the Senate, they don’t have the White House. And under our constitutional system, you cannot govern from one house alone. Today’s resurgent conservatism, with its fidelity to constitutionalism, should be particularly attuned to this constraint, imposed as it is by a system of deliberately separated — and mutually limiting — powers.

Given this reality, trying to force the issue — turn a blocking minority into a governing authority — is not just counter-constitutional in spirit but self-destructive in practice. …

November 2012 constitutes the new conservatism’s one chance to restructure government and change the ideological course of the country. Why risk forfeiting that outcome by offering to share ownership of Obama’s wreckage?

Michael Walsh explains the president’s game plan in the current negotiations over debt increases. The democrats are simply trying to blame Republicans for risking default, and doing everything possible to get a debt ceiling increase running past next year’s election in order to try to minimize their own vulerabilities on the issues of excessive spending and the deficit.

I liked his metaphorical comparison to the double dealing and intrigue in the Coen Brothers’ gangster movie Miller’s Crossing (1990). I guess the contrived and systematic insincerity must make Obama Bernie Birnbaum.

By now, the Obama “leadership” style should be blindingly apparent: Do nothing, lie in wait, and then counter-attack. Never present a plan if you can possibly help it, but deal exclusively in bromides and platitudes as you stake out the moral “high ground” and get ready to ambush the other guy. …

Meanwhile, have your media allies, talking parrots, and court lickspittles prepare the ground with standard-issue talking points — “The Tea Party Republicans are terrorists,” for example. …

Adamantly refuse to be pinned down about the specifics of anything, and have your platoon of Baghdad Bobs continue to insist (as good liberals always do) that up is down, black is white, and wishes are really horses, if not actual unicorns.

So the later Boehner walks into the trap, the quicker Harry Reid trumps him, and the sooner Obama can can declare for the umpteenth time that the time for talk is over, emerge as a hero — and get the debt-ceiling debate safely past the shoals of the next election, which is all he really cares about. Because, in case you hadn’t noticed, running for office is the only thing the Punahou Kid knows how to do.

As the deadline approaches and the complete annihilation of the entire world financial system as we’ve known it looms, or not, we spectators sitting on the sidelines far from the action are growing tired of the whole thing. Hearing second-hand reports of loud crashes and animal noises coming out of closed rooms gets boring after awhile.

Doubtless Armageddon-on-the-Potomac is great fun if you are yourself a player, but the rest of us recognized a good while back that we have the House, they have the Senate and the White House, and they hate us and vice versa, so no major substantive reform of the entitlement state, no permanent long-term resolution of excess federal spending can be expected to be possible until, and unless, the American public gives us a decisive mandate in 2012 (which I think they will).

In the meantime, Republicans should resist raising taxes, avoid selling out to democrats, but also avoid letting conservatives and Republicans getting saddled with the blame for all this.

Jim Garaughty, in his emailed Morning Jolt today, was marvelling, and poking fun, at the way conservatives are presently quarreling among ourselves about how all this should be handled.

I think a lot of the discussion among conservatives on Thursday can be summarized in one Twitter exchange:

Guy Benson: It would be awesome if people on our side would stop angrily questioning each other’s motives.

John Tabin: WHO’S PAYING YOU TO SAY THAT?

(John’s kidding.)

This isn’t the Civil War of Conservatism in the context of the Union vs. the Confederacy. No, that conflict looks simple and clear in its divisions: North vs. South, slaveholders vs. abolitionists, secessionists vs. unionists, etc.

No, this is messy, with lots of longtime allies and friends surprised to find themselves in opposition. This is the conservative version of the Marvel Civil War, a comic-book storyline in which all of the publisher’s most prominent heroes took sides on the institution of a “Super Hero Registration Act,” in which any person in the United States with superhuman abilities had to register with the federal government as a “human weapon of mass destruction,” reveal his true identity to the authorities, and undergo proper training. Those who signed also had the option of working for a government agency, earning a salary and benefits such as those earned by other American civil servants.

(Perhaps young, super-powered Americans have been listening to Derb’s “get a government job” lectures!)

Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four supported the act. Captain America and Daredevil opposed it. And the storyline tossed away the familiar story of heroes’ fighting villains to the surprising, unpredictable, and incongruous sight of popular, noble heroes’ fighting other popular, noble heroes — each convinced that his view is the right one and the best way to protect his values.

Not as outlandish a metaphor as it seemed two paragraphs ago, huh?

Now we have Rush Limbaugh vs. Thomas Sowell!

Hat tip to Theo.