The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto compares U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D–Illinois) …

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. . . . Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

… with the petulant brat at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.:

If the borrowing limit isn’t raised, “the whole world will have problems, which is why, generally, nobody’s ever thought to actually threaten not to pay our bills,” said Mr. Obama in an address at a construction company in Rockville, Md., on Thursday.

Taranto adds:

So which is it? Is a threat not to increase the debt ceiling a threat “not to pay our bills,” or is it “a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills”? It’s difficult to see how these two statements are anything other than a direct contradiction.

When you have trillion-dollar deficits, well, you can’t pay your bills.

Meanwhile, for those who claim the federal government cannot possibly cut anything in federal spending, Nick Gillespie of Reason provides them with a list of things to cut:

Much of what the feds spend money on is either unnecessary or ineffective … or both. The sequestration and the shutdown force voters and politicians to engage in serious and hopefully consequential cost-benefit analyses.

Start small, with something like arts funding, which comes to $1.8 billion annually for “the whole suite of federal arts-related agencies,” according to The Arts Index. That total is dwarfed by the $13 billion that Americans donate to cultural nonprofits and the $150 billion that we spend on art, music, movies and the like. …

Whole agencies are demonstrably ineffective. The Department of Education was created in 1979, and its annual budget for K-12 education comes in just shy of $40 billion. Test scores for high-school seniors on the National Assessment of Educational Progress – called the Nation’s Report Card – are either flat or slightly below where they were before the department existed.

Then there’s Defense, which is one of the single-biggest items in the federal budget. The U.S. accounts for 40 percent of global expenditures on military might and, in real dollars, our defense spending rose nearly 80 percent between 2001 and 2012. As the shutdown entered its second week, The Dayton Daily News reported that the Pentagon is sending half a billion dollars’ worth of “nearly new” cargo planes to a storage facility in Arizona, where they will join $35 billion worth of other unnecessary aircraft and vehicles.

When leaders like Representative Nancy Pelosi claim “there’s no more cuts to make,” I have to wonder whether they are tripping on powerful hallucinogens – whose availability undercuts another unnecessary, ineffective and costly federal program: the war on drugs.

Gillespie doesn’t put a price tag on the war on drugs, but his short list totals $77.3 billion, which surely is a good start.

People who have watched politics for a while know that crises usually fail to create good policy. The twin “crises” of the government “shutdown” (which as you know is actually a “slowdown” since three-fourths of the government continues to operate) and the looming debt limit have each happened numerous times in the past decades. (Government shutdowns began in 1980 after Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti ignored nearly two centuries of precedent in claiming that government funding could not continue at previous levels once the fiscal year ended Sept. 30. It is the fault of every attorney general since Civiletti and every Congress since then that previous-fiscal-year funding wasn’t restored, which proves the political value of that particular “crisis.”)

The debt crisis apparently has an actual date, Oct. 17. The government “shutdown” doesn’t have a deadline date, though more and more activities apparently won’t get funded as the “shutdown” continues.

Pundits may well be correct in reporting polls apparently blaming House Republicans for the “shutdown.” (Given that all appropriations are required by the U.S. Constitution to originate in the House, to use an IT phrase, that’s a feature, not a bug.) Pundits are incorrect in claiming that the longest “shutdown,” the Newt Gingrich-led event of late 1995 and early 1996, hurt Republicans. The GOP controlled the House from the 1994 elections until the 2006 elections, and with the exception of the brief departure of Sen. James Jeffords from the GOP that threw the Senate into Democratic hands, the GOP controlled the Senate that long too. The shutdown may have hurt Gingrich’s presidential aspirations, and it may have helped Bill Clinton get reelected, but it’s doubtful welfare reform and the investor-friendly tax cut of the late 1990s would have happened without the GOP’s flexing its political muscle.

The current political crises will end when it is politically advantageous to all sides concerned for them to end. In the case of the debt ceiling, that’s probably around Oct. 17. In the case of the “shutdown,” that date isn’t apparent, but it will be when Barack Obama, Senate Democrats and House Republicans figure out how to do something that will politically benefit all of them. Politics is about getting elected and reelected, after all.