In the movie “Groundhog Day”, Bill Murray is a weather reporter who nightmarishly relives the same Groundhog Day, day after day. Like Bill after his first cookie-cutter Groundhog Day, you probably thought we had survived Congress’s New Year’s Day fiscal cliff-hanger hangover.
But the war-painted Tea Partiers, (funded by the big-polluting billionaire Koch brothers and led until the morning after Christmas by Dick Armey, the Republican House Majority Leader who conspired with “Speaker From the Black Lagoon” Newt Gingrich to shut down our U.S. government twice), took us and furry little Punxsutawney Phil hostage. Three more economy-vandalizing hatchet jobs still lay-in-wait like improvised explosive devices on their calendars. By (appropriately) April Fool’s Day.
So the Wednesday before Groundhog Day, the Commerce Department estimated that last year’s healthy 3.1 percent third quarter growth plunged to a fourth quarter (recessionary) minus 0.1 percent. Our first “recessionary growth” since the April Fool’s Day – (second) – quarter President Obama inherited from Bush in 2009.
One big reason, American Nobel Prize-winning economists and corporate C.E.O.’s agree, is that the “uncertainty” Congress’s tax and budget standoffs cause – managers not “certain” whether to hire and spend – stunts our economic growth. Jobs, they all agree, would have grown 50 percent faster the past two years.
So “It’s Groundhog Déjà vu all over again”: six more weeks of apocalyptic nuclear winter. From getting economically nuked by rogue congressional Republicans.
It’s not our parents’ Republican Party. Now it’s The Party of (Buddy, Can You Spare Some) Change.
Those rogue elephants’ latest alias is “The Party of New Year’s Eve.” As the curtain dropped on the New Year’s show of the Republicans’ 800-Pound Guerrilla Theater of the Absurd, they dropped back and punted recession-causing meat-ax – (not surgical) – cuts to national defense, law enforcement and other vital functions. But just till March 1st.
That New Year’s budget showdown alone – separated from January 1st’s Taxmageddon-caused uncertainty – cut fourth quarter growth from 1.2 percent to that negative 0.1 percent. (Like in 2011, when congressional Republicans knee-capped growth by threatening to not pay their bills.) And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the March 1st meat-ax cuts will cut America’s 2013 economic growth in half.
The Treasury had to use accounting gimmicks to stay under the debt limit and keep direct-depositing Grandma’s cyber-checks, until the Tea Party’s January 30th eleventh-hour fiesta. Which was when The Party of New Year’s Eve punted off to Cinco de Mayo and Mother’s Day another 2011-ish “Gee, should we pay our bills for Bush’s credit card wars and other lavish spending?” debt limit shootout.
Groundhog Déjà vu again. The “It’s-not-your-parents’ Republican-Party” tactics threaten to sabotage every government responsibility. Not just the Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance or soldiers’ paychecks Americans worked hard to earn. And believed that the New Year’s Eve Party’s permanent-tax-breaks-for-the-rich-while-working-stiffs’-payroll-taxes-go-up deal insured.
And Congress’s “continuing spending resolution” stops the check-printing presses yet again on March 27th. Sadly, that won’t give the Animal House’s sophomoric Republicans time to celebrate their latest debt ceiling win – March 1st’s budget nail-biter- with another 2011-style, special-interest-financed Holy Land Great Sea of Galilee Drunken Skinny-dip Road Trip.
So can we blame President Obama if his hard work doesn’t always mint tons of “change”? When he has to keep settling @ switchblade-point for the Alleged Party of Business’s economy-starving, bus-token “spare change”?
It’s basic Ferris Bueller “non-voodoo, non-doo-doo economics” that – unlike families or businesses – the U.S. government has to spend more than it takes in, to jump-start the economy when it’s stalled. And thereby outgrow our national debt – like earning pay raises, faster than your family can spend them.
Then, when times are good, we should – unlike George W. Bush, who doubled our debt, or his dad, who helped triple our debt – reduce our debt load. Like President Clinton did. The Congressional Budget Office said the surpluses Clinton left Bush would pay off our entire national debt by now.
So before “W”, we didn’t need to stick Gramps and Grandma (and a lot of sick kids and crippled veterans) out on the old Eskimo ice floe and give it a shove.
Did congressional Republicans not learn the biblical lesson that seven years of famine followed seven years of feast? Did Bush “Ferris Bueller” that Sunday school class during Mardi Gras?
Because the Treasury has to borrow money now, due to reduced tax revenue from the Bush Crash and breaks for W’s jet-set buddies and their Bermuda Triangle tax laundries.
Like the Cayman Islands. Where Bush spent a handsomely paid Election Day teaching pirates of the Caribbean how to “shelter” American profits – in offshore P.O. Box corporations. (Yes. Really.)
The U.S. borrows to pay a lot more for unemployment insurance claims and food stamps since the Bush Crash. And to pay for Bush’s “weapons of mass distraction” wild goose chases.
Fortunately, the Treasury’s only paying, for example, six hundredths of one percent interest on four-week bonds. And inflation, though well-tamed, lets us pay the Communist Chinese back after a year with 98-cent bucks. But try “welshing” – (an “olde” ethnic slur, like “getting off scot-free”) – on Congress’s debts. Then try borrowing at that rate of one-sixteenth of one percent a year.
So, Dear Leaders of the Party of Spare Change/Groundhog Deja vu Fiscal Cliff-hanger Hangovers: Go ahead – keep messing-up America’s credit rating and job growth. And starving America’s goose that could be laying 50 percent more golden eggs.
But even our old student Ferris Bueller’s drooling economics classmates would beg you to stop organ-harvesting our foie gras for your billionaire backers. Because you’re “Like, totally!” cooking America’s goose.
Karen and Tom Lantz live in Hollister.
