Speaker Kevin McCarthy obviously not interested in paying for America's obligations

Echo editorial opinion published in the Las Vegas Sun news:
McCarthy, Republican Party not serious about nation’s debt limit.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Republican Party don’t give two cents about fiscal responsibility or reining in spending. What McCarthy cares about is distracting the American people from the reality that the GOP has saddled middle-class taxpayers with footing the bill for trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy's plan to keep the rich "richer"!

McCarthy’s own words all but admit it.

McCarthy strolled down to Wall Street on Monday to rally his corporate overlords about next year’s federal budget. He asserted that his support for raising the debt ceiling is dependent on concessions Democrats must make regarding future spending.

McCarthy conveniently forgot to explain one simple fact: The debt ceiling has nothing to do with the upcoming federal budget or future spending.

The only impact of the debt limit debate on future spending is whether the GOP’s refusal to raise the limit will tank the U.S. good faith and credit, leading to skyrocketing interest rates and permanent inflation. The result? A trashed economy and America vandalized by political zealots.

This bears further explanation.

Contrary to the manipulative GOP narrative that tries to draw a connection between the current debt limit and future spending, the debt limit debate is not a debate about how much money the U.S. is going to spend moving forward. It is a debate about whether the U.S. is going to pay back the money we already borrowed and spent.

In 2017, when then-President Donald Trump proposed welfare for the wealthy in the form of massive tax cuts for billionaires and multinational corporations, the U.S. was forced to borrow $2.289 trillion over the next 10 years to finance the tax cuts. We’re currently in Year 6 of paying for that Trump borrowing spree to support his rich friends.

Yet, now that Joe Biden is president, the same members of the GOP who kissed Trump’s ring and passed the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017, are suddenly concerned that the U.S. is borrowing too much and don’t want to pay back the loans we already took out and spent.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is asleep when it comes to caring about helping the middle class.

The GOP is quite literally advocating that the U.S. become a freeloading nation, borrowing from creditors around the world and then running away from our debts and refusing to pay them back. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given that this is exactly how Trump financed many of his biggest real estate development projects, using bankruptcy court to leave contractors, architects and more holding the bag for Trump’s woefully bad business leadership and inept management.

What is a surprise, however, is just how openly deceitful and two-faced the GOP is being about its plan to turn the United States into the largest freeloading grifter nation the world has ever known.

It was less than a year ago, when President Biden announced his student loan forgiveness plan, that Republican legislators couldn’t stop talking about the need for borrowers to take responsibility for the debt they signed up for and pay back their creditors. As recently as Wednesday, McCarthy bragged about blocking Biden’s “student loan giveaway for the wealthy.”

Yet, somehow, McCarthy is completely comfortable with the government borrowing money for Trump’s tax giveaways for the wealthy and then refusing to pay them back. He’s also surprisingly comfortable telegraphing to the world that the U.S. government is led by a collection of deadbeat swindlers who can’t be trusted to pay back their debts.

McCarthy and the GOP are putting on a show designed to feign interest in federal spending and good governance while distracting from the reality that they are the ones who keep upping the ante on the cycle of federal debt. 

The GOP is the party that keeps borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and then refusing to take responsibility for its borrowing and spending, let alone pay it back. It has also raided the formerly stable Social Security trust fund to pay for previous tax cuts — a way of shifting the burden to other generations.

Remember, when Trump was in office Republicans voted to raise the debt ceiling three times without so much as a peep about the need to control spending. Not one word.

Worst of all, some Democrats are falling for the Republican dog and pony show.

While Biden has held firm in his conviction that the U.S. must be a nation that can be trusted to repay our debts on the international stage, Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., told Axios, “I respect the White House position, but not in perpetuity. Because negotiation, that’s what this whole institution is about.” Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., echoed that sentiment, saying, “We’re going to have to negotiate. We obviously want to move away from just legislating by crisis ... I’m encouraging continued negotiations.”

Both legislators are missing the point that the time for negotiation regarding this spending has already passed. The U.S. already spent the money. The only possible thing to negotiate is whether we’re going to default on our debt and tank our national creditworthiness, which shouldn’t be up for negotiation at all.

In other words, arguing that the federal government shouldn’t raise the debt ceiling without first making major cuts is backwards.

McCarthy knows it, but it scores him political points so he doesn’t care. He’s bald-faced lying to the American people, trading the full faith and credit of the United States of America and trading the economic health of our children and grandchildren so he can win a game of political chess. It’s shameful.

If Republicans want to argue about future spending cuts, they are welcome to do so — after they raise the debt ceiling and actually work cooperatively to figure out how to pay for the money they already spent.