Today’s big story is that someone got into an argument with the President:
According to Politico, Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Doyle was the one who introduced the analogy, saying that a "small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money." Biden accepted the premise, saying to the wary caucus: "They have acted like terrorists."
[snip]
"I did not use the terrorism word," he told "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley. "What happened was there were some people who said they felt like they were being held hostage by terrorists. I never said that they were terrorists or weren’t terrorists, I just let them vent."
Either way, GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry should fit right in:
(What’s he talking about? Quantitative easing, probably. Think of it as trickle-down stimulus: the Fed prints money to buy bonds from banks, who then lend it to… well, they haven’t been doing much of that in the first two rounds of this near-treasonous policy, mostly because banks and large companies don’t seem to need it:
Nonfinancial businesses are now sitting on close to $2 trillion in liquid assets that could be invested immediately if there was an increase in sales, and banks have $1.5 trillion of excess reserves that could be lent as well.
This was tried in Japan last decade, and no one knows if it worked then, either. But it’s not like the administration looks ready to do much, and the Fed doesn’t have a lot of options.)
Perry’s rhetoric is almost as heated as what Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said about the debt limit:
“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”
Hostage! Finally, something both parties can agree on. In the spirit of bipartisan comity, I think D.C. can fairly compromise on McConnell’s rhetoric. Terrorism isn’t the American way, but protection rackets—nice bond rating you have here, shame if something happened to it—have a more august tradition.