Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy are in a position where they’re forced to listen to each other before the U.S. debt limit gets raised — and for one renowned economist the whole situation is just “weird.”
(“Weird” might seem out of place as a descriptor in the stodgy, rule-bound worlds of economics and government — but keep in mind the most popular economics book in decades is called Freakonomics. Evidently things can get weird and freaky anywhere.)
Here is McCarthy playing his cards, even if it’s “weird” he was dealt them:
House Republicans have done our job.
— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) April 26, 2023
RT if you agree → President Biden must now do his. pic.twitter.com/PyU9k3ZKTn
In describing the mess that Biden finds himself in with McCarthy, where the House Speaker can use the unrelated issue of the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge to make demands about budget reallocations and spending cuts, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman resorts to the “weird” descriptor not once but twice.
Note: Even Donald Trump, when he was President, said the debt ceiling should never be used as a negotiating wedge, implying such a move as McCarthy now makes would be dishonorable — see video below.
President Trump on the debt ceiling: "I said, I remember, to Sen. Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, 'Would anyone ever use that to negotiate with?' They said 'absolutely not.' That's a sacred element of our country. They can't use the debt ceiling to negotiate." pic.twitter.com/WvI6j4nqMQ
— The Hill (@thehill) July 19, 2019
Krugman writes in a recent newsletter that the “United States has a weird and dysfunctional system in which Congress enacts legislation that determines federal spending and revenue, but then, if this legislation leads to a budget deficit, must vote a second time to authorize borrowing to cover the deficit.”
Krugman goes on to say that “this weird aspect of budgeting allows a party that is sufficiently ruthless, sufficiently indifferent to the havoc it might wreak, to attempt to impose through extortion policies it would never be able to enact through the normal legislative process.”
That kind of extortion is akin to a man holding a “hand grenade,” as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse phrases it.
No movement from the man with the hand grenade, Kevin ‘Mr. Default’ McCarthy. He needs to put the pin back in and come to his senses.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) May 17, 2023
There are believers in realpolitik who might tell Krugman that “extortion” is part of the “normal legislative process” — or at least that it is now. But it’s not codified, and that’s what Krugman means. By way of example, basketball is technically a non-contact sport, but tell that to LeBron James when he’s banging his way into the paint for a layup.
In pressing his advantage, McCarthy is all elbows and head butts and doesn’t appear to be ethically above a kick to the groin either, but Biden still finds himself in the “weird” position where he can’t get a foul call — because the “weird” rules give McCarthy leverage (on the budget) based on an unrelated matter (the debt ceiling).
There is, of course, a budget process wholly separate from the debt ceiling issue, and McCarthy — as Krugman points out — is circumventing it to push through a GOP wish list because Biden — so far, anyway — has no other recourse to escape the “weird” situation created by the law.
