House Speaker John Boehner has no regrets about the economy-destroying debt-ceiling showdown that happened last year. On the contrary, speaking at the Peterson Foundation’s fiscal summit he promised to do it all over again an essentially unlimited number of times, arguing that the principle of $1 in spending cuts for every $1 in new borrowing authority is a good one.
That’s bad enough, but as I wrote last week it’s made much worse by the House GOP’s decision to pass a bill backing out of what they agreed to last time around, which means it’ll be extraordinarily difficult to reach any kind of new compromise. Obviously if Mitt Romney is in the White House come 2013, the GOP’s debt aversion will mysteriously vanish and we’ll have a big ceiling increase to accommodate new tax cuts. But if Barack Obama gets re-elected, he’s either going to need to mint the platinum coin or else simply proclaim the whole thing unconstitutional (or both) to spare the country endless repetitions of this destructive exercise.
