Our view: S&P confirms what everyone already knew

Now it's official. The United States' unquestioned AAA credit rating is gone, for the first time ever. And how could it be otherwise?

OTHER VIEWS: Where fingers are pointing

Standard and Poor's, the agency responsible for Friday's downgrade, merely confirmed what anyone with their eyes open for the past decade or two already knew: The U.S. has a huge and growing debt problem that it is resolutely unwilling to solve.

Not unable. Just unwilling.

Not just politicians, but anyone who buys into their divisive, fanciful rhetoric.

Good-government groups, economists, academics and many others have warned for years that U.S. finances were out of whack. They've shouted that the longer the nation waits to fix them, the more painful the fix will be. They've drawn up common-sense solutions.

And still Republicans and Democrats act like two men fighting desperately for control of a raft that's headed for Niagara Falls.

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Democrats have taken to calling what S&P did the "Tea Party downgrade," and in the most immediate sense, that's a fair assessment.

A few weeks ago, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, were talking about a $4 trillion "grand bargain" that would have satisfied S&P. But the Tea Party members scuttled that plan, and they remain indifferent to the downgrade — except to the degree that they can use it to attack "the Democrats who control Washington," to use the current GOP sound bite. What control? If either party had it, or if both had compromised, there would have been no downgrade. Instead, the GOP intends to keep refusing any tax increase, even if doing so sends the raft over the falls.

The downgrade might raise borrowing costs, making the debt problem worse and pushing up interest rates for the public as well.

Democrats, meanwhile, have no credible long-term plan for reducing spending. Obama, to his credit and some of his legion's fury, embraced entitlement cuts as part of his deal with Boehner. But the president seemed disinterested until recently, failing even to support the proposals of his own deficit commission. The raft will go over the falls unless spending slows, and that will require significant adjustments to programs Democrats least want to touch, Social Security and Medicare.

The parties' behavior is made all the more exasperating because the solution is so obvious.

Every serious bipartisan group that has looked at the nation's frightening debt projections has prescribed virtually the same fix: a deficit-reduction package of $4 trillion or more, mostly from spending constraints but with significant new tax revenue. The Simpson-Bowles Commission appointed by Obama proposed capping federal spending at 21% or less of GDP (Republicans prefer something around 18%), raising revenue by ending giveaways in the tax code, trimming Social Security benefits for future retirees while raising more revenue for the program, and other measures. Most difficult but most important would be getting control of health care costs.

Not pleasant, but affordable, necessary and practical — unless you're an ideological warrior.

If there's a silver lining, it's that the real crisis has not arrived. Moody's and Fitch, the other two big credit rating agencies, have so far left their U.S. debt ratings where they are. The U.S. Treasury market also is still the most liquid in the world, highly prized by investors looking for safety. S&P alone won't change that, in part because it is a flawed messenger. Along with the other agencies, it destroyed its credibility and helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis by giving gold-plated ratings to mortgage-backed securities it knew were worthless, or close.

But at a time when the economy is dangerously weak and the stock market is already reeling, S&P's action is just more gasoline on the fire. If the markets swoon, taking millions of Americans' retirement savings with them, voters will have the right to be furious at Washington — and to tell their representatives to lay down their ideological swords until they've steered the nation to safety.