The Missiles of October 2013

The United States economy is threatened with destruction not by a foreign power but by domestic terrorists who apparently control the government through Speaker John Banal.  His missiles are aimed at us all.

  Today President Obama held a press conference in which he explained the current missiles of October crisis--the negative missiles of votes not taken on the government budget and authorizing the Treasury to pay outstanding debts--in much the same terms as in his recent speeches. (Here's a summary.)  He explained why he can't give in to government by extortion.  He said no one would expect him to do so if the extortion was coming from a foreign power, and sure enough, John Banal responded later in the day by saying he won't put these matters to a clean vote because that would be "unconditional surrender."  So now he's head of a party at war with the United States?

If he had been listening closely, he might have noticed that President Obama gave him a face-saving out: simply vote to reopen the government and pay the bills, for even a short amount of time, and attach to that bill something to the effect that once these are done, the President and Congress will hold negotiations on--practically anything they want.

Banal says all he wants is a conversation.  President Obama has offered it.

But as President Obama pointed out, so far Banal's definition of a conversation is a list of Rabid Right demands followed by the President and Dems in Congress saying, "okay, we'll pay your ransom."

There is not much time left before the economic equivalent of the dogs of war are unleashed--much easier to start than to stop.  It's 9 days until the Secretary of Treasury says the government will run out of money to pay all its debts, but it won't take that long.  When this starts to look real to investors, governments holding US debt and just people with money in the bank, the downward spiral begins.

Where does it go? I've seen informed speculation that default could mean an immediate spike in interest rates to 12%, an unemployment rate of 25% by Christmas, gas and other prices sky high overnight, and even with some sort of panic fix, the damage will continue for years.  And that's possibly just the beginning, because the effects ripple out to the world economy, and then ripple back.  The missiles of this October are not thermonuclear, but they are still extraordinarily destructive to almost everyone.