Jim McTague‘s latest “D.C. Current” column in Barron’s offers little hope that the federal government’s partial shutdown will end any time soon.
The conventional wisdom was that Republicans and Democrats would bury their bombast and resolve the budget fight before moving on to resolving the debt-ceiling battle. Instead, the intractable battle of wills has gone on and on, conflating the budget fight and the debt-ceiling fight. That, in turn, has increased the odds of a debt default by the U.S. Treasury. The fanatical, small-government, free-market-loving Tea Party faction of the House Grand Old Party is engaged in a dangerous game of fiscal chicken with the equally fanatical big-government, welfare-state-loving Senate wing of the Democratic Party. Default looms, and neither side will blink. …
… CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS ARE NOT at all certain that their colleagues won’t let the economy fall off the fiscal cliff. I was at the White House on Wednesday evening when Republican and Democratic leaders emerged from a powwow with the president. Both Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid were grim-faced, and both groused that there had been no progress on resolving the impasse over either the budget or the debt ceiling. More telling, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who usually does not shy from tossing shrill, partisan tongue-bombs at the GOP, was soft-spoken and restrained, and was the only leader offering any hope. She obviously was trying to play down the political divide. When she described the meeting as productive, she elicited a surprised look from Reid.
Obama, on the other hand, tried to generate scary headlines.
