You know how, in movies where killer asteroids or invading aliens threaten humanity, people — even those who normally hate each other — unite to battle a common enemy? I always figured that if America were to face such a threat, we and our politicians would quash all the acrimony, set aside our differences, and work together toward a solution for the sake of our survival. After this whole debt debate debacle, though, I’m not so sure.
That’s why, instead of simply giving my usual smartass take on the whole debt ceiling mess the country’s been forced to endure, I’ve decided to tell the story in the context of such a movie: the Michael Bay classic Armageddon. I believe it’s the most cathartic and illustrative way for me to give my two cents.
Please be forewarned that my metaphors may be mixed. Hopefully, my message will not.
The story begins earlier this summer, when the news media begin to focus on a huge meteor that appears to be on a collision course with the Earth. In fact, it’s not just headed for the planet: It’s projected to make a direct hit on Washington, D.C.
All the experts say that if we don’t finalize and enact a plan by August 2 to avert this collision, we’d see catastrophic effects in the succeeding days and weeks here in the United States. Moreover, the impact is predicted to be so great that the entire world would be severely affected in a negative way.
Now, in a bit of a subplot, just a few months earlier, a couple of well-respected guys named Erskine Simpson and Alan Bowles led a blue-ribbon panel to study in depth how to prevent such catastrophic collisions with extraterrestrial objects. They submitted a bold, detailed proposal to the federal government, designed not just to protect us from any strikes in the short term, but also to keep us from being destroyed by a meteor in the foreseeable future.
Sadly, most of Washington either trashed it or paid little more than lip service to the commonsense proposal, because it required compromise, cooperation, and political sacrifices, three things that are harder to find in D.C. than a member of Congress who favors term limits.
Plus, most folks there either thought they had a better solution to such a problem or simply assumed that such an object wouldn’t hit us. “After all,” they thought, “nothing like that has ever struck us in our 235-year history. What would be the chances that we’d be hit now, or at least while I’m in office?”
Eventually, as the meteor gets closer, and our political leaders continue to bicker about what to do, more and more Americans begin to grow fearful. They wonder if Congress and the president will do what needs to be done to avoid catastrophe. As a result, the struggling economy becomes even more sluggish, partially because people are reluctant to book trips to cities that may be obliterated from the face of the Earth.
At the same time, other folks, particularly of the Tea Party persuasion, openly question the dire predictions regarding the impending impact. They claim that the experts forecasting a cataclysm are like Chicken Little proclaiming that the sky is falling, when that’s essentially what will happen if no action is taken against the meteor destined to rain down destruction from above.
And even if the experts are correct, the Tea Party-backed members of Congress are thoroughly convinced that the constituents who elected them did so for one purpose. They believe they have a single mandate that overrides all other concerns: reduce the size of government.
Spending billions of dollars for a new meteor diversion program is the kind of fiscal irresponsibility they were sent to Washington to eliminate. Besides, if their raison d’être is to make government smaller, and the meteor is predicted to strike D.C. … mission accomplished.
In a cameo scene that strains even the most ardent filmgoer’s ability to suspend disbelief, Donald Trump goes on Fox News and says something completely obtuse, even by his standards. Representing an equally obtuse faction, Trump says being struck by the enormous, speeding meteor would actually be a good thing for the country, because it would all but guarantee that Barack Obama wouldn’t be reelected in 2012, presumably because there’d be nobody left alive to vote for him.
Meanwhile, the meteor gets closer, and Americans get aggravated because the politicians are nowhere near a solution, mainly because they can’t reach a consensus regarding where the money will come from.
Normally, when the U.S. wants to raise billions of dollars quickly, like to fund a war or bail out a bank that ruined the economy, it borrows money, oftentimes from foreign countries like China. However, in this scenario, neither China nor Japan nor any of our usual creditors will loan us another dime. They’ve heard about the meteor. They’re afraid we may not be here to pay back the money.
So the plot thickens. The money would have to come from within our own means. But where?
Many Democrats and independents argue, “Increase taxes on the top 2% of earners. Make them pay what they did in the ’90s when Bill Clinton was president.” After all, unemployment was about half of what it is now, and the government had a surplus of money to keep meteors from hitting us.
The Republicans counter ferociously. They categorically maintain that we can’t raise taxes on the rich (also known as “job creators”), because they need that money to create the jobs they didn’t create in the previous eight years with the help of the Bush tax cuts.
Moreover, most of the Republicans signed a pledge to Grover Norquist, promising not to raise taxes, nor vote for anything Norquist’s überpurist mind deems to have the same effect as a tax hike, such as closing loopholes for big oil companies or eliminating ethanol subsidies. Breaking that pledge would mean a crueler fate at the hands of Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform group than any meteor could deliver. Norquist fervently believes not raising taxes is far more important than diverting a giant meteor hurtling toward humanity.
Eventually, it’s determined that the money needed to avert an unthinkable disaster would have to come via spending cuts. Now the only question is which programs to cut.
It’s argued we can’t cut defense and homeland security. Terrorists might kill us before the meteor does.
Lobbying groups for the elderly, like AARP, take to the airwaves with commercials protesting the suggestion that the money come from reducing Medicare and Social Security benefits. To people in Washington, the only thing scarier than an enormous meteor streaking toward the planet is a bunch of pissed-off elderly voters.
Muddling the debate is the fact that five years earlier, then-Senator Obama cast a largely symbolic vote against a project to divert an asteroid that was on a near-Earth course. While he admits it was a stupid thing to do, President Obama says he never really wanted it to hit us. As a fresh face in Congress, he simply did it for the attention.
After what seems like hours of partisan wrangling, the movie concludes with congressional leaders from both parties finally meeting with the administration and hammering out a compromise. Rather than actually diverting the meteor, the plan — which is passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president — calls for slowing down the meteor, postponing its arrival until 2013, after next year’s November elections. In the interim, they’ll form a 12-member panel to study the problem and propose later this year a more permanent solution to the meteor issue.
Now, I know this makes no sense physically, since slowing the meteor would, in and of itself, prevent a collision due to the fact that the Earth is moving around the sun. In short, we’d be further down the line by the time the delayed meteor intersects the Earth’s orbital path.
Jeremy White – Publisher
