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When Speaker Kevin McCarthy asked President Joe Biden to begin negotiations to lift the debt limit just after taking the gavel, he received condemnation from both sides of the aisle.
Biden demanded a “clean” limit increase with no strings attached, ridiculing McCarthy’s offer as “the MAGA economic agenda.”
And many on the left echoed Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, arguing that it could be catastrophic to hold the debt limit hostage and risk government default.
AEI’s Michael Strain went so far as to say that the process of negotiating over spending itself is illegitimate, arguing in the Financial Times that, “When it comes to politics, the normalisation of brushing up against default combined with leaders that have waning influence over members of their parties is a catastrophe waiting to happen. “
One measure of strong leadership is the ability to focus on a specific goal while ignoring the noise until you achieve that goal.
In this case, Speaker McCarthy understood that our country finds itself in a uniquely treacherous time in our economic history, and that strong medicine is required to avoid significant economy upheaval.
He laid out the relevant reality repeatedly, including at his recent speech at the New York Stock Exchange: The stagflationary environment we now live in really has one main cause, runaway spending.
