A Recently Awakened Liz Claman talks Debt Ceiling; Taxes; and PJs

All it took was an innocuous greeting of “Good morning, Don” for Liz Claman to be accused of using her “porno voice” again. “I just woke up,” she protested to Imus, who scolded her for not appearing in studio. “I think I came in last time, and you looked at me and said, ‘Why’d you come in? You could have done this by phone.’”
 
But Imus recalled no such exchange, and then listened to Claman, an anchor and reporter for Fox Business Network, talk about her triathlon training for a few minutes before getting to the meat and potatoes of the interview; also known as, when will Congress raise the damn debt ceiling?
 
“Not right now,” Claman said, and observed that the August 2^nd deadline is “being used by a lot of people on both sides of the aisle as their sort of moment to stand up and let their voice be heard, and say, ‘Oh, look at me! I’m so great!’”
 
She added, “It’s really actually sad for this nation, because the debt ceiling has been raised something like more than 60 times since 1972, without much fanfare.”
 
As for why there is so much attention being paid the issue this time around, Claman chalked it up to the enormous deficit. “We’ve got $14 trillion weighing on this, and suddenly that number has hit people in their psyche, and they’ve woken up,” she said.
 
Democrats want to “tweak” taxes as a means of increasing revenue, but Claman noted the time to raise taxes was nearly a decade ago, when the economy was more prosperous, instead of lowering them, as Bush did.
 
“Ever heard of a rainy day fund? That’s what we should have been doing,” she said. “But we did not, and now it becomes a massive issue, because we’re not even servicing the debt. We’re note even paying off the interest.”
 
The Cap, Cut, and Balance Act that the House will vote on today is, as Claman put it, merely “kicking the can down the road.” In reality, the Act is moot because it’s unlikely to pass a Democrat-controlled Senate, and Obama has already said he’d veto it.
 
“He wants a big deal,” Claman said. “He wants to get this done so that we don’t have to revisit it every couple of months.”
 
Besides being distracted, both sides are being stubborn, in Claman’s view: House Minority Leader Pelosi has said she won’t touch entitlement programs like Medicare, and Republicans are intransigent on getting rid of tax deductions on things like luxury items.
 
“If we’re talking about compromise, the kind that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were able to wrangle from Congress, wouldn’t you expect they’d give on a few other things?” Claman said. “Should we really be giving tax deductions to people buying private jets?”
 
Imus quietly voiced his support of that last measure, then admitted he actually liked having Claman on the phone. “I like you on the phone,” she purred in reply, then revealed she was still in her pajamas: boxer shorts and a “Peter Frampton Comes Alive” t-shirt.
 
Which was enough for Lou. “Are you kidding?” he chimed in. “That’ll do it!”
 
-Julie Kanfer