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Debt Limit - Brinkmanship vs Chicken [1]

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Date: 2023-05-20

Brinkmanship is the art of taking a crisis to the very edge of disaster before achieving an agreement. The classic example is the Cuban Missile Crisis where the US and Russia spent two weeks threatening each other with nuclear annihilation before agreeing to withdraw missiles, Russia from Cuba and the US from Turkey. While it is a dangerous game all sides in the contest understand the result of failure would be catastrophic for everybody.

Chicken is different. One side doesn’t care if the result is disastrous. It’s all about ego and death is preferred to losing. You can’t negotiate with someone playing chicken. You can either surrender abjectly and totally, join them in a race to the death, or refuse to play at all.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. ~ Wargames (1983)

The Republicans in the debt limit negotiations are playing chicken. Their every move makes a negotiated settlement more impossible. For Republicans there is almost no realization that negotiation failure is the worst possible outcome. Republicans believe that winning is more important than preventing default and economic chaos.

Then there is the Freedom Caucus, the stubby little tail wagging the Kevin McCarthy dog. They want economic chaos.

You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the economy goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have, you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we were when we were great. ~ Donald Trump, 2014

Their goal is to tear down the American society so they can rebuild it into a theocratic dictatorship. Agreement, any agreement on the debt limit fails in their goal of reformative bedlam.

Biden has few options.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/20/2170463/-Debt-Limit-Brinkmanship-vs-Chicken

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