Still No Budget Deal - Current Happenings

j-mac said:

It's not a lie...Obama is playing the same game he always has....Say one thing at the outset, then change **** up right before a deal is done...It's called negotiation in bad faith.

j-mac

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Actually its a sign of how apart the two parties are. Obama was trying to thread the needle between both camps and was unable to. The request for additional revenues was to appease the democrats who also need to vote for this thing and therefore have their concerns addressed as well as the republicans, since neither party has the votes to make it happen in a partisan manner.

megaprogman said:

Actually its a sign of how apart the two parties are. Obama was trying to thread the needle between both camps and was unable to. The request for additional revenues was to appease the democrats who also need to vote for this thing and therefore have their concerns addressed as well as the republicans, since neither party has the votes to make it happen in a partisan manner.

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I agree that the sides are far apart. The request for addtional revenues had been achieved until the President decided to up the ante. Why did he do that? Was it because the Democrats are as intransigent as they say the GOP is? And, then we have Reid's plan, and it calls for no additional revenues. How can that be? All of this seems to be sending very mixed signals.

In Message #57 in this thread, I noted:

In my opinion, even when the debt ceiling is raised--and I still expect it to be done prior to August 2--the political dysfunctionality problem by itself suggests that the U.S. is not worthy of a AAA rating. Hence, I would not be surprised that at least one of the major Ratings organizations would lower the U.S. credit rating even if the debt ceiling is raised on a timely basis. After all given the political risk involved, confidence that the U.S. would make the decisions that need to be made, much less implement them, would be challenged to say the least.

Apparently, the political dysfunctionality issue was one of the criteria by which S&P determined that the U.S. no longer warranted an AAA rating. In part, S&P declared:

...the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.

Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government's debt dynamics any time soon.

Standard & Poor's Downgrades US Credit Rating From AAA to AA+ - ABC News