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It appears that the manner in which the Republicans steered or conducted the debt-ceiling debate, or given the fact that Republicans refuse to end the crippling Bush tax cuts or implement measures to raise revenue for the U.S. government, resulted in the United States’ credit downgrade by Standard & Poor’s. Also, the Republican Party’s refusal to work with President Obama, or consider his policies, has certainly played a part in the overall uneasy attitude towards Congress regarding its inability to manage the U.S. economy, to implement policies to spur job growth, or to implement legislation to curb the United States’ debt. Also, the Tea Party, through it’s influence and inability to grasp the important role that government is supposed to play in managing the well-being of society, has been a major factor in generating political insanity and economic uncertainty. Via NationalJournal.com:

The big new element on Friday was an official outside recognition that U.S. creditworthiness is being undermined by a new factor: political insanity. S&P didn’t base its downgrade on a change in the U.S. fiscal and economic outlook. It based it on the political game of chicken over the debt ceiling, a game that Republicans initiated and pushed to the limit, and on a growing gloom about the partisan deadlock.   Part of S&P’s gloom, moreover, stemmed explicitly from what a new assessment of the GOP’s ability to block any and all tax increases.

S&P was remarkably blunt that its downgrade was mostly about heightened political risks:  “The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed,” it said.

(TEXT: Politicians React to Downgrade)

“The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year’s wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently.”

To be sure, S&P didn’t specifically single out Republicans. It criticized the overall $2.4 trillion deal as too limited, and it implicitly criticized both political parties for refusing to tackle their sacred cows – entitlements, in the case of Democrats; tax increases in the case of Republicans.

But it’s hard to read the S&P analysis as anything other than a blast at Republicans.  In denouncing the threat of default as a “bargaining chip,” the agency was saying that the GOP strategy had shaken its confidence.  Though S&P didn’t mention it, the agency must have been unnerved by the number of Republicans who insisted that it would be fine to blow through the debt ceiling and provoke a default.

As many other analysts have noted, the deficit-reduction deal wouldn’t stop debt from climbing faster than the nation’s GDP over the next decade.   It warned that the government’s publicly-held debt would climb from 74 percent of GDP at the end of this year to 79 percent by the end of 2011.

But one reason S&P said it had become more gloomy was that it had revised its assumptions about the most likely course of fiscal policy. In previous projections, it said, its “base case scenario” had assumed that Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would expire at the end of 2012, while tax cuts for families earning less than $250,000 a year would be extended.  That, it said, would have reduced deficits about $950 billion over ten years.

But the new S&P base case assumes that Congress extends all the Bush tax cuts.   “We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act,” S&P said.