Where Do These People Come From?

In trying to make sense of the apparent willingness of the Republican Right to force the USA into default my reading brought me to a George F Will who in a Fox News Roundtable with the headline "Default is a Choice" was quoted as saying:

"The last time we faced cataclysm over this was when Standard & Poor's lowered our credit rating, people said disaster. No, the cost of borrowing actually went down 40%. I don't think the markets are as irrational as some of the people on Wall Street say. I repeat what I have said here before, default is a choice. A choice in the sense that we have 10 times more revenue coming in than is needed to service our debt.

We can continue to service our debt by not paying certain other vendors and certain other programs. We will only default if it is a choice and, furthermore, the 14th Amendment empowering the president not at all, but the Congress entirely, says it is a constitutional requirement to pay, under the full faith and credit of the United States, our bonded debt."

Confused?  So am I  I also don't know where he is getting his figures from so they must be taken with a grain of salt as his blatanly subjective interpretation of why interest rates declined after the S&P downgrade.

Standard & Poors were concerned about the size of the deficit; the inability of the US government to function; and the implementation of Quantative Easing (QE) which was viewed to be potentionallly inflationary at some point in the future as it would artificially depress interest rates and increase Money Supply.

As for actually having 10 times more revenue coming in than is needed to service our debt is specious at best. If you are very specific about what debt you wish to service than we could have 10, 20 or even 100 times more revenue than debt.

But really gets me is his use of the 14th Amendment to explain why default is a choice.

The key clauses of the 14th Amendment are:

1.      State and federal citizenship for all persons regardless of race both born and naturalized in the United States was reaffirmed.

2.      No state would be allowed to abridge the "privileges and immunities" of citizens.

3.      No person was allowed to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law."

4.      No person could be denied "equal protection of the laws."

Somehow he has managed to suggest that the 14th Amendment makes the Executive Branch either subservient or irrelevant to the Legislative Branch and therefore Congress has the sole right to decide if we default or not.

No, the 14th Amendment has to do with ensuring that the Civil Rights Act passed in 1866 would remain valid and that "all persons born in the United States...excluding Indians not taxed...." were citizens and were to be given "full and equal benefit of all laws." (Quotes from the Civil Rights Act of 1866).

I think Mr Will is still stuck in the Civil War era, and I can't help but think somehow he wanted to bring President Obama's citizenship into question, let alone the role of the President.

But what I really want to know is why a respected, seemingly intelligent Pulitzer Prize winning journalist has descended to such rubbish.