Standard and Poor's downgrading of the credit worthiness of the U. S. government from AAA to AA+ should come as no surprise to anyone. We all knew that current levels of debt are unsustainable. So what do Obama and Geithner and their shills in the liberal media do? They blame the messenger for the ill tidings he delivers.
They do the same with the Tea Partiers. The central concern of the Tea Partiers is fiscal responsibility: "There is one common thread that is uniting the one million plus people who protested on April 15th, 2009 at over 850 Tea Parties across this great country. That common thread is that we all want fiscal responsibility with our tax dollars."
So what does the Left do? Instead of facing reality, it launches scurrilous attacks on the messengers. They are racists, terrorists, hostage-takers, astro-turfers.
But what is to be done? This from the WSJ:
Despite S&P's opinion, there is no chance that America will default on its debts. The real importance of the downgrade will depend on the political reaction it inspires.
If the response is denial and blaming the credit raters, then the U.S. will continue on its current road to more downgrades and eventually to Greece. What has already become a half-decade of lost growth will turn into a lost decade or more.
If the response is to escape the debt trap by the stealth route of inflation—a path now advocated by many of the same economists who promoted the failed spending stimulus of 2009—then the U.S. could spur a dollar crisis and jeopardize its reserve currency status.
The better answer—the only road back to fiscal sanity and AAA status—is to reverse the economic policies of the late Bush and Obama years. The financial crisis followed by the Keynesian and statist revival of the last four years have brought the U.S. to this downgrade and will lead to inevitable decline. The only solution is to return to the classical, pro-growth economic ideas that have revived America at other moments of crisis.