Maybe the Enemy is, But...

In recent days Fitch Ratings downgraded the debt of the United States from its highest standard, AAA, to AA+.  One possible consequence is a sell-off of U.S. securities, which are our instruments of debt. People buy them so the government has cash to start its tailgate bonfires, with the idea that one day, the government will buy them back at an increased price and the person who bought them in the first place will make money. Which, OK, everybody has to believe in something.

A couple of things should be noted -- Fitch Ratings says it has taken this move because of "a steady deterioration in standards of government." In the immortal words of John McLain, (no, not those), "Welcome to the party, pal!"

Our tendencies in government have been towards crowning our president, pundityfying our Congress and turning our Supreme Court into a super-legislature. The "steady deterioration" has been going on for a long time. The leaders of our parties are people who work for jobs they can't do and, apparently, don't want. Yes, Nancy Pelosi was pretty good at getting votes out of her party's members and Kevin McCarthy has rediscovered Article 1, Section 1 and is putting on a pretty good King Josiah act. But think back to the years between the election of Barack Obama and the death of Senator Ted Kennedy.

The Democratic Party controlled the White House, House of Representatives and had a veto-proof majority in the United States Senate. Yet it took then-Pres. Obama, Speaker Pelosi and then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid until 2010 and any number of parliamentary shenanigans to get the president's number-one desire, health care passed. If you remember the 1980s, do you have any doubt that had Tip O'Neil been around he would have had some kind of health care reform passed before Mitch McConnell came in to work and John Boehner finished his smoke?

The fuss should not be that Fitch has noticed steady deterioration in 2023 -- it should be that these standards have been deteriorating for quite the while now. Plus, AA+ will still let you buy a few tanks and such on credit; it's not that bad.

To close, several opinion pieces about the downgrade seemed to give it more impact than it has - as professor Don Boudreaux notes in this piece, our government has been downgraded. We're just fine.