There Is No Short-Term Debt Crisis...Hardly Even a Problem

Have you noticed that the original reason for holding the country hostage, the need to defund Obamacare, has melted away and is now pretty much accepted as having been unrealistic all along?

What is astonishing to me is that pundits as well as politicians on the right don´t question the legitimacy of extorting what they want as the price for doing their job. They merely say that the choice of funding for Obamacare was a tactical mistake, that the focus should have been the broader issue of government spending. The practice of extortion does not bother them; they just wrote the wrong ransom note.

All of the people fixated on the supposed debt crisis should read Adam Hartung´s column from last May in Forbes Magazine, which asks the question: "Economically, Could Obama Be America´s Best President?" Hartung´s column takes the form of an interview with Bob Deitrick, the author of the book, Bulls, Bears and the Marketplace.

Among many other things, the point is made that:

The deficit is now only 4% of the GDP, down from over 10% at the end of Bush’s administration – and projections are for it to be only 2% by 2015 (before Obama leaves office.)  America’s “debt problem” seems largely solved, and almost all due to growth rather than austerity.

Note that the quotation marks around "debt problem" are not mine. But this fact, that our short-term debt crisis is imaginary, has been pointed out over and over again by economists who actually study the economy. It apparently means nothing to the professional deficit hawks. They are willing to shut down the government and even see it go into default to solve a non-existent problem.