Friends,
Congress has decided to play a game of chicken with the finances of the United States. A game of high-speed mumbley peg with the nation’s digits under their rusty jack knife. What’s worse, (a worse thing, or are you extending the metaphor? -ed) is that the country’s economy hasn’t recovered enough to afford even a tetanus shot against the missteps of these ham-fisted apes. Before you get all fiscal on me, I’m not cutting the prevaricator in chief any slack on this either. He had the opportunity at the beginning of the year to ask for a clean debt increase bill and missed his chance. Now it’s the ’72 Munich Olympics in the capitol with our finances held at gunpoint, all due to some red meat types latching on to the idea that a debt limit increase is for future spending and not to pay for stuff we already bought.
The Treasury Department has set a deadline for next Monday when we’ll run out of money to write checks for government things, like checks for pensioners and tranquilizers to keep the space monsters we’ve locked up from eating us. We’re in a pickle, folks.
What will happen? Will the legislative and executive branches cut a last-minute deal? Will the president, in lieu of a deal, exert his executive privilege to extend the debt ceiling on his own? Will the “full faith and credit of the United States” be as suspect as a clean lab result from a professional bicycle racer? The answer to these questions, and whether we’re all doomed, will be answered next Monday.
In the meanwhile, fill up your gas tanks. Just saying.
– bob