Pearl River      I liked President Biden’s position when he was refusing to bargain with the Republican Freedom Caucus dominated proposals from the House of Representatives.  Showed grit.  It probably wasn’t hard to say in the early days of this standoff, when their demands then and now were essentially that he hands over his presidency to them and unravels all the policies and programs he has implemented or passed since he took office.  Unfortunately, Biden may have believed then that there is a heartbeat of the old Republican pro-business ideology in this rogue group that has captured the House Speaker.  Biden is now being pressed to settle this by businesses, here and abroad, to prevent the collapse of the US dollar as the heart of the global financial system.  That’s just not something these hardcore radicals care about.  They are MAGA and isolationists and only care about riding their one-trick pony.

Biden now seems open to getting through this crisis on the backs of the poor.  The Republicans want to curtail all spending, but they are especially determined to attack social programs and tack on ever more draconian work requirements.  Their proposals would raise the age for mandatory work requirements.  They want to add some work rules to Medicaid in order to erode health benefits.  The list goes on from there.  Biden claims he won’t negotiate anything that would blunt access to healthcare, but he’s opened the door, which would allow attacks on food stamps and the meager welfare benefits that currently exist.  Fortunately, some Senators including Fetterman and Sanders, along with others, have said, “No way!”  Others argue that some of the Republican demands couldn’t pass the House either.  At his point, with the deadline looming, it looks like there are more dealbreakers than deal makers.

The House also wants to gut Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and its climate provisions.  Talking to Zach Amittay from Environmental Entrepreneurs on Wade’s World about the debt ceiling, he said his organization of 10,000 businesses were horrified at the threats to this game changing breakthrough.  They have been mobilizing in Washington, as well as home districts and the majority of their members are in red states, he told me.  He found it unbelievable that they are opposing something that is projected to create 60,000 jobs.  I found it incredible that politicians no longer wanted to deliver benefits to their districts and were now only committed to ideological and cultural political warfare.

It’s ironic that these extremists want to both require work, when it has to do with the poor, but don’t want to create jobs, which would provide more people with work.  The dispute between Florida’s governor DeSantis and Disney is a perfect example.  He would rather not hear objections to his “don’t say gay” bill, then have Disney spend a billion dollars in Orlando with 10,000 construction jobs and several thousand new jobs paying over $100,000 annually.  No way that the biscuit cookers in Florida or around the country understand this kind of tradeoff of bread and butter for pie in the sky in the by and by.  This makes it clear that the only constituency that any of them are trying to serve is their big money donors, not the voters back home.