ANS -- Brad Hicks on the debt ceiling

Here's a short piece, and comments, from Brad Hicks, about the negotiations over the debt ceiling.  

--Kim

Brad Hicks

S6oaohed

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This is an even bigger problem than the Senate filibuster, the filibuster is almost just a symptom of this any more, a side effect.

I heard the saying years ago that "the person who wins the negotiation is the one who's most willing to shoot the hostage." Way too many people in DC, whether conservative, centrist, or liberal have learned that if they're the last holdout, the one most willing to tank the entire US economy and in so doing plunge the whole world into chaos rather than negotiate, if they refuse to even engage in substantive negotiations until the last 12 hours before the end of the world, they (at least think that they) will get more concessions than if they negotiated in good faith from the beginning.

This, right here, is what Joe Biden, with his lifetime of personal relationships with the people who play this game, his legendary good faith and "reasonableness," thought he could put a stop to. He couldn't. The perceived incentives are too high, and the first law of systems analysis, the first thing they taught me on day one of my first class in it, is, "The behavior a system rewards is the behavior the system produces."

And if we don't find some way to fix this? A social norm that if you weren't in the negotiations, in good faith from day one, you don't get listened to at all in the last week before the deadline? Where your threat to "shoot the hostage" is treated like a bluff? Or, better yet, if we can't change the system so that the median voter can't "shoot the hostage" even if they want to? If that can't be done? Then sooner or later we're going to learn the true cost of brinkmanship:

If you dance on the brink long enough, sooner or later you fall off.

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• Andrew Jensen

  Can the hostage shoot the negotiators?

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  • Brad Hicks

    Andrew Jensen "It is a terrible thing to shoot at a king -- and miss."

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• Deech Mestel

  You're absolutely right. The shutdowns are now going to be a normal occurrence because that is when the negotiating actually begins. Every good faith negotiation prior to an actual shutdown is actually worthless because nothing really happens until the… 

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  Kim Cooper

  We need to either get rid of the debt ceiling, or require that they raise it before they spend it instead of after. What's it for anyway?