Another “Government Shutdown” Fight in Washington’s Future

One of the big stories from Washington is that there may be another fight over the debt limit, which could mean…gasp, hide the women and children…gridlock, downgrades, government shutdown, default, and tooth decay.

Okay, perhaps not tooth decay, but the DC establishment nonetheless is aghast.

Last year, there were actually two big confrontations between House Republicans and President Obama.

The first fight occurred early in the year and revolved around spending levels for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year. I explained in February of that year how advocates of smaller government could prevail in a government shutdown fight, especially since the “essential” parts of the government wouldn’t be affected.

But I wasn’t surprised when GOPers buckled under pressure and accepted a deal that – at best – could be categorized as a kiss-your-sister compromise (and, as I noted elsewhere, our sister wasn’t Claudia Schiffer).

Then we had the big debt limit fight later in the year, which led to absurd claims that failure to increase the debt limit would lead to default – even though the federal government was collecting ten times as much revenue as was needed to pay interest on the debt.

Once again, Republicans were unable to withstand the demagoguery and they basically gave Obama what he wanted after agreeing to a “supercommittee” that was designed to seduce them into a tax increase.

Now the game is about to start over. It’s deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra might say.

Here’s some of what the L.A. Times reported.

Republicans in Congress are heading into summer much the way they did last year — instigating a showdown with the White House by demanding massive federal budget cuts in exchange for what used to be the routine task of raising the nation’s debt limit to pay the government’s bills. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) is doubling down on the strategy that ended in mixed results last year after the country came to the brink of a federal default before a deal was struck with President Obama. In that go-round, both sides saw their approval ratings with voters plummet and the nation’s credit was downgraded. …The risk for Republicans is not only in presenting another high-stakes showdown at a time when voters have grown weary of the gridlock in Washington.

The reporter’s assertion that the debt limit fight led to the downgrade is a bit silly, as I explain here, but that’s now part of the official narrative.

On a separate matter, I can’t help but shake my head with frustration that GOPers still haven’t learned that America’s fiscal problem is too much spending, and that deficits and debt are symptoms of that problem. Here’s another passage from the L.A. Times story.

“The issue is the debt,” Boehner said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “Dealing with our deficit and our debt would help create more economic growth in the United States and it would lift this cloud of uncertainty that’s causing employers to wonder what’s next.”

No, Mr. Speaker. The problem is spending, spending, spending.

Returning to the main issue, the debt limit isn’t the only big fiscal fight that may happen this year. There will also be the spending bills for the 2013 fiscal year, which starts on October 1 of this year. That will mean another fight, particularly since the left has no intention of abiding by the spending limit that was part of last year’s debt limit deal.

And if Republicans hold firm, that means another “government shutdown.” Though it really should be called a “government slowdown” since it’s only the non-essential bureaucrats who get sent home.

In any event, since I’m glum about the likelihood of anything good happening, let’s at least enjoy some good cartoons from Jeff MacNelly. He passed away a number of years ago, but these cartoons from the mid-1990s are just as applicable today as they were then.

These are amusing cartoons, so long as you don’t actually think about the fact that government is bloated in part because Washington is littered with programs, departments, and agencies that are filled with non-essential bureaucrats. And don’t forget that these bureaucrats are overpaid, getting, on average, twice the compensation of workers in the productive sector of the economy.

But I don’t want to end this post on a sour note, so here are some good jokes from the late-night comics about government shutdowns.

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Debt, Entitlements, Downgrades, Unfunded Liabilities, and the Europeanization of America

I cover a wide range of issues in this interview for Bloomberg Asia. My main theme, not surprisingly, is that government is too big.

And I specifically warn about the looming explosion of entitlement spending as the baby boom generation retires.

 

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To Be Fair, Obama’s Responsibility for the Downgrade Is only 15 Percent

It was a strange experience to read the comments and emails generated by yesterday’s post on the “Obama downgrade.”

Democrats and liberals were upset that I blamed Obama for the downgrade, as you might expect. Republicans and conservatives, however, were agitated that my first sentence pointed out that Bush bore significant responsibility for the spending binge that created the fiscal crisis.

This got me thinking about the underlying causes of America’s long-term fiscal problems and whether it might be possible to come up with some sort of reasonable estimate on which Presidents are most responsible for fiscal crisis.

So I decided to look at the most recent long-run forecast from the Congressional Budget Office. As you might suspect, entitlement programs are THE reason why the United States is in deep trouble.

What does this allow us to say about various presidents? Well, it turns out that Social Security is a relatively minor part of the problem, so even though President Roosevelt’s policies exacerbated and extended the Great Depression, the program he created is only responsible for a small share of the fiscal crisis. To give the illusion of scientific exactitude, let’s assign FDR 13.2 percent of the blame.

The health care numbers are much harder to disentangle because it’s not apparent how much of the increase is due to Medicare, Medicaid, Bush’s prescription drug entitlement, and Obamacare. A healthcare policy wonk may know these numbers, but the CBO long-run forecast didn’t provide much detail.

So with a big caveat that these are just wild estimations, I feel reasonably comfortable in saying that both Bush and Obama made matters worse with their reckless entitlement expansions, but that they merely deepened a fiscal hole that was created when President Johnson imposed Medicare and Medicaid.

With that in mind (and ignoring, for the sake of simplicity, the role of other Presidents – such as Nixon – who expanded the size and scope of health entitlements), here is my ranking of presidential responsibility for America’s fiscal decline.

This does not mean, however, that it was unfair yesterday to apply the “Obama Downgrade” label.

In part, he is responsible because the downgrade from Standard & Poor happened on his watch. But the real reason he earned that label is that he doubled down on the reckless policies of his predecessors and demagogued against lawmakers such as Cong. Paul Ryan who actually have tried to solve the problem.

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What Are the Consequencs of the Obama Downgrade?

Even though I predicted it had to happen at some point because of the Bush-Obama spending binge and America’s giant long-run entitlement crisis, I confess that I’m somewhat surprised that the United States has suffered a debt downgrade for the first time.

That being said, I don’t think the downgrade will matter. Everyone knew the U.S. was heading in the wrong direction before the announcement by Standard & Poor. Moreover, big investors have very few attractive options for where to place their money – thanks to a weak global economy. As such, I suspect the federal government will still be able to borrow money at very low rates.

What does matter, however, is that the American economy is burdened with a bloated public sector that is sapping the nation’s economic vitality. And this problem will get worse every year because of a toxic combination of poorly designed entitlement programs and demographic change.

As the government gets bigger, this hinders growth by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy. The damage  is then compounded by the fact that the two main ways of financing the public sector – taxes and borrowing – both have additional adverse economic consequences.

In other words, the United States has fiscal cancer. Yet rather than try to cure the disease, politicians are – at best – kicking the can down the road. Here is my dour assessment on Bloomberg.

The only glimmer of hope, as I wrote yesterday, is that House Republicans have made serious efforts to restrain the burden of federal spending.

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