Paul Ryan and the Grand Poobahs were horribly wrong on S&P downgrade. But nothing changes.
by David Atkins
NPR’s Marketplace had an interesting report yesterday on the foolishly dire predictions that were made about the S&P downgrade of U.S. credit last year. Regular Hullabaloo readers will remember that Digby and I roundly, repeatedly and consistently mocked both S&P’s rationale for downgrading U.S. credit, and the notion that the downgrade itself would hurt the economy. Paul Krugman made the same points.
It turns out–surprise, surprise–that we were right and the big names in lights were wrong:
It’s been about year since the twin fiascos of the debt ceiling debate and the subsequent Standard and Poor’s downgrade of this country’s credit rating. You remember: No more AAA, only AA+.
It was, indeed, historic. And forecasters in business and politics made dire predictions about how the downgrade would whack your wallet…
As far as worst predictions, it would take a medal stand the size of a swimming pool to hold all the people who were wrong. But we’ve only got room for one, so the gold goes to Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, speaking on Fox just after the downgrade.
Paul Ryan: Obviously, not only does it hurt the federal government in its ability to close the deficits, but it hurts people. You know, car loans, home loans, all these things are gonna go up.
Didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite occurred. Home loan interest rates are now at record lows, in large part because global investors kept faith that America would always pay its debts.
And yet it’s still fashionable for the Very Serious People to wring their hands over the S&P downgrade. Erin Burnett still puts up the tracker of the number of days since the downgrade, as if it mattered a whit. Centrist politicians still say preposterous things like this:
Congress needs to stop the brinkmanship politics and work together to balance our nation’s budget and restore our bond rating. This will give businesses the certainty they need to invest in capital projects and expand their workforce. This in turn will create demand for goods and services that will buoy our economy. If Congress can’t pass a budget on time, they shouldn’t be paid.
And no one “serious” calls them out for being as demonstrably wrong as if they declared the sky was green.
And year after year, partisan conservative crazies like Paul Ryan and the centrist Grand Poobahs will be treated with utmost deference and respect, while Paul Krugman and silly progressive bloggers like us will be sidelined and marginalized as rabid know-nothings. A year later shows like Marketplace will make a brief note of the horrible wrongness of the conventional wisdom while making some false equivalences between left and right, and the cycle will repeat.
When it comes to being “serious”, you can never be too wrong. You can only be too shrill about the facts.
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