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By Root 755 0

for poor children, which also helped farmers; passing an amendment to the financial reform bill that requires the derivatives sold by traders on Wall Street to be as transparent and financially sound as the agricultural derivatives farmers buy to hedge against losses from yields or prices that are too low; and saving more than a thousand factory jobs by insisting that the federal government enforce the rules against unfair trade practices. And she voted for the health-care bill, which postelection analysis showed cost Democrats in Republican-leaning areas about 6 percent of the vote. I think it was the right vote, especially for a state like Arkansas, with lots of uninsured small businesses and working families who will now be able to afford health insurance. But on Election Day, it looked like too much government.

Now, in 2011, Republicans and Democrats in Congress and in the White House are locked in a pitched battle over how and how much to cut our annual deficit at a time when our economic recovery remains shaky. Republicans say they will tolerate no new taxes, even on upper-income individuals who reaped almost all the income gains of the last decade (90 percent to the top 10 percent; more than 60 percent to the top 1 percent and more than 20 percent to people with incomes over $9 million), with multiple tax cuts, to boot. They opposed the stimulus in part because the tax cuts only went to the bottom 95 percent. For months, they threatened to refuse to raise the debt limit, which allows the government to borrow money to pay bills it has already incurred, a move that would further harm the recovery. If we ever refused to honor our obligations, the government’s credit rating would be downgraded. Americans would pay higher interest rates across the board, on credit card purchases and on small-business, home mortgage, car, and college loans. The government’s annual interest payments on our national debt would also rise, further increasing the deficit.

For reasons that are unclear, the president and the Democratic Congress did not raise the debt ceiling after the election, in November or December 2010, when they still had a majority. Given that fact, as well as the president’s duty to go the extra mile to avoid a default, the last-minute agreement in early August 2011 between the House Speaker, both Senate leaders, and the White House to raise the debt limit in return for $2.5 trillion in budget cuts over a decade and no new revenues could have been a lot worse. It requires $1 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, followed by an agreement early in 2012 to cut $1.5 trillion more, after Congress gets recommendations from a twelve-member committee of its members, made up of six senators and six representatives, equally divided by party. Democrats won the concession that Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and a planned increase in Pell Grants1 would be exempt from the first round of cuts, a mixed blessing. And in the first year, 2012, only $21 billion of the $1 trillion will be cut, a concession to the weakness of the economy.

The whole debt ceiling/deficit reduction debate process was an extreme example of why Mark Twain said the only two things people should never watch being made are sausage and laws. To the outside world, the United States looked weak and confused, completely in the grip of the antigovernment zealots in the House Republican caucus, with Democrats unable to use their Senate majority to pass a bigger, more balanced plan of cuts and taxes, because they hadn’t raised the debt ceiling when they had the chance and the antigovernment ideologues were willing to default on our debt to get their way. Representative Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party favorite, even endorsed a default, describing it as a needed dose of “tough love.”

SHORTLY AFTER THE AGREEMENT WAS ANNOUNCED, one rating agency, Standard & Poor’s (S&P), downgraded America’s long-term credit rating anyway. The decision was criticized in many quarters because no one doubted the ability of the United States to pay its debts. The nation has total