Most of the commentary that I've seen railed against the tax increase and the $4 trillion in new debt. The only problem with this critique is that if the GOP got it's way, the debt would have been much worse.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that almost all of the $4 trillion comes from the expansion of the Bush tax cuts for those making under $400, 000 and the permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax. The "new spending" (and that term requires that you believe that tax cuts that aren't paid for aren't spending, which they are) equals about $300 billion.
But Republicans generally, and the Tea Party in particular, wanted all of the Bush tax cuts made permanent, plus the patch of AMT, which would have made CBO's deficit projections larger still. That's the math, folks. Arguing with it doesn't change it.
That would have been fine if Republicans had a plausible way of paying for it. Luckily for them, Republican dogma dictates that tax cuts aren't spending, so the deficits that result from them, in the immortal words of Dick Cheney, "don't matter."
Of course, that brings us to loophole reductions highlighted in the various Ryan plans and the Romney campaign. These of course were nothing short of blatant lies, which we know because no one ever presented a list of deductions to be eliminated or the math behind them. The only reason to leave that information out is because you know that it would be politically impossible to pass. Romney and Ryan would have gotten their tax cuts, to be sure. But they either wouldn't have been paid for or the burden of doing so would have fallen squarely on the middle class.
And if deductions and loopholes are such a wonderful way of paying for tax cuts, why wasn't the idea explored in 2001 and '03? It had been done rather successfully in 1986 and there was certainly no shortage of economists in the Bush White House. My guess is - and this is only a guess because I'm not aware of anyone else asking the question - is that they either knew that the math didn't work or the optics of having the middle class pay for it would be politically worse than the deficits themselves.
But you can cut spending to pay for tax cuts, right?
Yes, that's theoretically possible. But Republicans have never actually tried it before. Neither Reagan or the second Bush tried cutting spending anywhere close to the costs of their tax cuts. In fact, both dramatically ramped up defense spending, which obliterated the savings from domestic spending cuts. But that too was okay because the GOP doesn't believe that defense spending is "spending," either. Indeed, Mitt Romney promised a third surge in security spending without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it.
Nor has anyone complaining about Obama's budgeting bothered to come up with anything close to $4 trillion in domestic cuts over a decade. They've promised a lot of reforms, but none of those take effect for a decade after enactment and are guaranteed to have monstrous transition costs. President Bush's 2005 Social Security plan was estimated to cost a trillion dollars in the first ten years, and I expect that Medicare reform based on personal plans would cost at least that much, and probably much, much more.
If the Grover Norquists and Erick Ericksons of the world had their way and everyone in the U.S government was suddenly a Republican, the projected deficits over the next 10 years would grow faster and larger than those currently on the table. Though they like pretending otherwise, their policies have costs, too. Both history and simple arithmetic teach us that.
As I've said before, I was fine with the sequester with its brutal, wide-ranging and immediate cuts. It was the GOP who objected to it most strongly because half of those cuts came directly from the Pentagon's hide, and the Republican platform calls for a dramatic increase in military spending. Another ideological perversion of the Republican Party is their failure to understand that defense spending, being wholly dependent on foreign policy, is the most discretionary spending of all. And at over $600 billion a year, it's the biggest discretionary program of all.
So when Republicans refuse to pay for their tax cuts or cut spending in a serious or timely way, they're left with one fallback position - shut down the government and possibly default on the debt.
You get a good idea of how unserious these people are when you read something like this; "Specifically,( Pennsylvania Senator Pat) Toomey tells Joe Scarborough, “We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean, and insist that we get off the road to Greece because that’s the road we’re on now.”
Excuse me, but what in the fuck is a "temporary partial government shutdown?"
My guess is that it means that the parts of the government (which also happen to be the biggest parts of it) that Republicans like, such as the military and the CIA, continue conducting business as usual. The GOP might be stupid, but it isn't as suicidal as you might think, so Social Security checks will continue to go out and doctors will keep getting paid under Medicare and Medicaid. All "a temporary partial government shutdown" means is that there's no urgency to reach a deal.
Not being a real government shutdown, that allows people like Erickson to think that Republicans have room to maneuver. This is because people like Erickson don't know how life works outside of their silly ideological bubbles.
Friends, this isn't going to be a replay of 2011. Back then, both sides were negotiating before the government hit the debt ceiling and continued as Treasury was juggling existing money to pay the bills. In this case, the ceiling was reached on Tuesday morning, Obama is on the record as saying that he isn't going to negotiate serious spending cuts and Boehner has said that he isn't going to negotiate with Obama at all. In addition to that, I expect the intellectual misfits in the Tea Party to start calling for a default by the end of next week.
The timing of this suggests to me that a default is a serious possibility this time. In fact, I think it's probable.
The markets freaked out in 2011 just because the GOP talked about defaulting and America's credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history. Can you imagine what will happen if those crazy bastards actually do cause a default?
Remember the meltdown following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? This will be much worse. At least the government had access to $1.6 trillion for TARP and the Recovery Act then, which it won't this spring because no one will lend America money at anything less than ruinous interest rates. The economy won't "slow down," it'll come to a screeching halt and the United States could start losing a million jobs a month immediately.
By the way, do you know how hard killing terrorists will be when Congress doesn't even have change for the bus? China might also use the opportunity to ramp up its ambitions in the South Pacific, and God only knows what signals Iran will read into a U.S default and Depression.
And all of it will happen at the insistence of alleged "fiscal conservatives."
It's time to finally, finally admit that these people are fiscal conservatives the same way that Lindsay Lohan is sober and chaste. They are to sound economic policy what snake handling is to modern spirituality.
These people are willing to usher in Armageddon based solely on the factually unsupportable belief that Jesus will be waiting at the other side.
If you live outside America, you would be wise to get whatever money you have there out soonest. And if you live in the United States, know that Glenn Beck is probably right and you should start stockpiling gold, canned goods, firearms and explosives forthwith
The Republican Party is going down and they're fixing to take America down with it.
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