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If Congress doesn't act soon, interest rates could spike--maybe for a long time. Then you'll care.

The White House and Republican congressional leaders insist the debt ceiling will be raised well before the United States has to default, which would cause massive economic disruption.

But a resolution seems less than assured. In the last few days, Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty have joined a growing conservative chorus loudly denouncing a deal, and antagonism among the various parties appears to be growing, not diminishing.

Over the past months, Republicans enjoyed enormous advantages. Opinion polls showed that voters are eager to reduce the federal debt, and they want to do it mostly but not entirely through spending cuts.   There was a Democratic president eager to move to the center. He floated certain ideas that would be normally unheard of from a Democrat. According to widespread reports, White House officials talked about raising the Medicare eligibility age, cutting Social Security by changing the inflation index, freezing domestic discretionary spending and offering to pre-empt the end of the Bush tax cuts in exchange for a broad tax-reform process.

The Democratic offers were slippery, and President Obama didn’t put them in writing. But John Boehner, the House speaker, thought they were serious. The liberal activists thought they were alarmingly serious. I can tell you from my reporting that White House officials took them seriously.

[ David Levine ]

Grover Norquist is the powerful president of Americans for Tax Reform (where reform means elimination). He issues to all Republican candidates and office holders Taxpayer Protection Pledges—a promise never, under any conditions, to support the raising of a tax—and then he monitors and reports the performance of those who have taken the pledge, as almost all Republicans in Congress have. That, in effect, puts a ban on congressional discussion of tax income, since the Republican bloc has pledged not even to consider it.

The idea of committing candidates to a rigid position as a condition of their being elected seems to be catching on. In Iowa, in anticipation of the caucuses there, Bob Vander Plaats of the conservative religious group Family Leader has issued a "Declaration of Dependency" committing a candidate to marital fidelity along with advocacy for the Defense of Marriage Act and opposition to pornography, to Sharia law, and to "uneconomic anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy [and} tax policy." The pledge demands, as well, that its subscribers recognize "overwhelming statistical evidence" that married couples "enjoy better health," and it requires the appointment of "none but faithful [i.e. religious] constitutionalists as judges or justices."

The world economy is a complex, unknowable organism. Most of us try to diversify our investments and balance risk and security to protect against the unexpected.

But a few years ago a group of bankers thought they had the magic tool to help them master financial trends and predict the future. Sophisticated risk assessment models would enable them to rewrite the rules and make more money.

Their arrogance was soon exposed. Along came the financial crisis.

Mel Evans / AP

Given his credentials as a center-right conservative with executive experience and pro-business inclinations, Obama’s former ambassador to China may be less of a long shot for the GOP nomination than many think, says John Avlon.

It’s so crazy, it just might work. Jon Huntsman is set to officially announce his run for the presidency today in sight of the Statue of Liberty, where the Gipper kicked off his fall campaign in 1980.

The Reagan homage is intended to remind Republicans that Huntsman comes from the Western conservative tradition, a genial chief executive whose core electoral attribute is supposed to be the ability to win crossover votes.

Huntsman’s entry into the race has the chattering class chattering, even as conservative activists and Republican consultants consider his campaign a nonstarter. There’s just no way, they say, that a former Obama ambassador who intends to make civility a strategic centerpiece of his campaign can compete in an increasingly conservative populist GOP.