This morning on ABC's "This Week," recently announced Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty insisted that failure to raise our debt limit might not have any deleterious effects on our economy at all, because, according to him, there are some experts who question the premise that it might. Besides, he said, we can avoid a crisis for quite some time by using our cash reserves and passing a law that requires the Treasury to honor foreign debt payments first. (Evidently this would mean - beyond abandoning good accounting practices - we just wouldn't pay social security recipients, veterans, or spend money on worthless programs that only benefit U.S. citizens.)
Yet he also argued that, "if" Republicans vote to increase the debt limit, they had better "get something" for it, such as (for example) a balanced budget amendment or other goodies the current crop of conservatives tends to slaver over. So an issue of national interest is again turned into a partisan political one.
Pawlenty's lack of concern about exceeding the debt ceiling can have only two explanations: (a) he is just playing the political brinksmanship game du jour, or (b) he's an idiot. Either way, he's playing political roulette with the nation's future. The reasoning behind choice (a) is obvious. Regarding (b), let's just say that maybe Pawlenty doesn't understand the extent to which the U.S. standard of living depends on our heavy borrowing from abroad. Foreign creditors may not panic immediately (though they might) but in the long term, our credit rating will suffer, and our ability to coast on foreign loans will be lessened. In the long run, that outcome would very likely be a good thing; in the short term, there's a high likelihood it will spark reactions we can't be sure of, can't control, and can't put back in the bottle.
So why would we want to tempt fate by taking a step that could (notwithstanding the predictions of a handful of tea-drinking economists) lead right to another Republican depression? There's no clear answer, but we've seen the same thinking in the GOP approach to climate change -- the same possible dire consequences; the same denials based on the opinions of a small minority of "experts," the same lack of concern, and the same counterargument, i.e., when obviously a disaster might be in the making, even if 10% of experts have some doubts about it, why not do what we can to avert it, or attenuate its effects? I haven't seen any GOP politician offer an answer for this.
The party's current mode of thought seems to be boundless but baseless optimism. That's the message I take from a recent argument made by John Boehner, that the budget cuts sought by the Republican party won't be painful because their effects will immediately buoy the economy to new heights! Businesses, those selfless guardians of the public interest, once free of the shackles of onerous taxes and regulations, will start spending wildly, creating jobs left and right, snapping the economy out of its doldrums. Never mind that it has never happened before in our history, or that it was the same process that took us in the opposite direction, back in 2002-08.
If anyone were thinking Pawlenty might turn out to be the voice of reason who can really address our problems, I think they'd better keep looking. His fifteen-minute interview suggests that he is far too wedded to Republican dogmatic orthodoxy to be the man who could lead us out of the wilderness. Further, neither he nor Boehner is ready (and to be fair, neither are any leading Democrats at this juncture) to admit the truth that we probably will have to make some sacrifices to improve our long-term outlook.