10 Things I Don’t Understand About the Debt Ceiling Debate

Bay of Rage protest against
budget cuts in Oakland

1. Why the Republicans can get away with claiming that the entire debt is the fault of a president who has been in office for two years.

2. Why there are so many different polls on raising the debt ceiling, when no one cares what the people think anyway. See, for example, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20080492-503544.html , http://www.gallup.com/poll/148454/debt-ceiling-increase-remains-unpopular-americans.aspx , http://tinyurl.com/debtapocalypse.

3. Why people (including the Obama administration) are not demanding that Congress cut its own salaries to be equivalent to the average Social Security payments (without cost of living increases).

4. Why the mainstream media never seem to ask people like Boehner, Kyl and deMint why they voted for debt increases seven times under Bush, while grilling Obama about why he voted against it once.

5. What the people who are pushing for huge spending cuts, no tax increases and a balanced budget really really think is going to happen if they win.

6. Why there don’t seem to be any women economists writing about it.

7. Why if the Progressives Caucus is the biggest caucus in Congress (83 members, compared to 26 Blue Dogs and 53 Tea Party Republicans), it has the least power.

8. What ever happened to those polls showing that Americans like socialism better than capitalism?

9. Why a political ruse like the McConnell plan can work when everyone knows about it.

10. Why #debt or #budget deal are not among the top trending subjects on Twitter right now.

Best thing I heard in the last week (or maybe in the last year):

It turns out that “Gilligan’s Island” was really anti-colonialist social commentary. Sherwood Schwartz, who created the show along with “The Brady Bunch,” said so. “‘I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications,’ he told Time magazine in 1995. ‘On a much larger scale this happens all the time. Eventually, the Israelis are going to have to learn to live with the Arabs. We have one world, and “Gilligan’s Island” was my way of saying that.’” Honest. That was in his obituary last week.

Schwartz must have been right, though, because the show only lasted three seasons and probably has the best-known theme song in history.