Anthony Mason Bums Us Out...Or Explains the Debt Ceiling Deal. Your Call!

Anthony Mason, the business correspondent for CBS News, listened intently this morning as Imus complained of his inability to breath. “I’m sorry for your suffering,” Mason said. So he’s the one.
 
He does not cover politics, but Mason pays close attention to events in Washington because, more often than not, they impact the economy. He expects no different from the debt ceiling agreement President Obama announced last night, and which Congress will hopefully approve later today.
 
“Part of what they’re expecting here is that the momentum from the deal and the momentum from the markets is going to basically lean on the rank and file to get in line,” Mason said, though he acknowledged about DC, “It’s a whole new game down there.”
 
One would hope, as Imus and Mason pointed out, that Obama and the party leaders on both sides counted votes before proclaiming victory. They’re probably also hoping to avoid a situation similar to what happened with TARP in 2008, when Congress initially voted down the program; watched the markets sink nearly 800 points in one day; and then reversed the decision.
 
An editorial in the New York Times today lashed out at Obama for capitulating to Republicans on the deal, which cuts a lot of spending and raises no taxes, but Mason noted one thing the President did get: the ability to raise the debt limit through 2012.
In terms of the basic points, however, “it seems to me the Republicans got most of what they want,” Mason conceded.
 
While the Democratic Party might not be thrilled today, Mason reminded Imus that this is only the beginning of a very long process that also includes the creation of a bipartisan sub-committee that will make another $1.4 trillion cuts down the road, to say nothing of the county’s credit rating remaining on the line.
 
“At least on paper, this is not going to satisfy what the credit rating agencies said they wanted,” Mason said of the debt ceiling agreement, adding later that, as he sees it, a downgrade would be more embarrassing than catastrophic.
 
Mason declared that nobody—not the President, not Boehner, not Harry Reid—has comported themselves admirably during this process. “This is not a moment in time…that folks are particularly proud to be an American,” Mason said. “This process has been way too messy.”
 
One of the major sticking points has been the Tea Party’s insistence on adding a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. In theory, Mason told Imus there’s nothing wrong with this proposal; in reality, with the U.S. economy “barely moving,” as he put it, it’s not the best idea.
 
“If you make cuts too quickly you risk essentially sending us into another recession,” he said. And as the country tries to (slowly) pay off a $14.5 trillion debt, Mason noted one of the primary economic problems—job creation—has remained stagnant since 2000, long before the recession kicked in.
 
“We were creating 18 million jobs a decade for the previous three decades,” Mason said. “For the first seven years of the last decade, we only created about 7 million. So something wasn’t working.”
 
One depressing, overwhelming problem at a time, okay dude?
 
-Julie Kanfer