NYT editorial: Blundering Toward Recession: Urgency and Sense Elude the House

The increasingly urgent cries to resolve the debt-ceiling stalemate — from Wall Street, bond rating companies, the Federal Reserve chairman, the White House, the Senate and pretty much everyone else — seem unable to penetrate the soundproof bunker built by House Republicans. Their leaders announced on Friday that they would waste precious days next week on a hopeless crusade for spending caps and a balanced budget amendment.

The measure they propose would make a radical cut of $111 billion in 2012, then limit federal spending to 19.9 percent of the gross domestic product by 2017, far less than the current 25 percent and not nearly enough for Americans’ needs. It says the debt ceiling could go up only if Congress approved a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, a meaningless proviso since Republicans don’t have the necessary two-thirds majority even in the House, let alone the Senate.

At this late stage, this plan is a dangerous delusion suggesting that the House leadership regards the gravity of a default as seriously as it does global warming. Perhaps it didn’t notice that Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, said on Thursday that the failure to raise the debt ceiling would most likely have “detrimental and long-lasting” effects on economic growth.

President Obama took to the microphone yet again on Friday to plead for his overly generous offer to the Republicans to cut up to $3 trillion in federal spending over the next decade — including disturbing reductions in entitlement spending — in exchange for modest increases in tax revenues, which he noted that most Americans supported. It remains astonishing that Republicans spurned an offer that would have drawn cries of protest from many Democrats. (We don’t like it either.)

(More here.)