Say this for Tea Party Republicans: They don’t back down. No apologies for triggering a partial shutdown of the federal government, then refusing to raise the debt ceiling without concessions. Condemnation rains down on them from the White House, from foreign capitals, from public opinion polls, but the Tea Party rages on. .. It’s that sense of being on the brink of disaster that feeds Tea Partiers’ determination to fight to the end. For them, the debt-ceiling deal reached by the Senate on Oct. 16 is merely a cease-fire. But the Tea Party’s belief that things are slipping away is misplaced. Obamacare aside, events have actually gone the movement’s way ever since Republicans wrested control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. Discretionary spending has been falling. Federal-employee head count is down. And since 2010, deficit reduction has been more rapid than in any three-year period since the demobilization following World War II. .. That victory, however, has come at a high price. The Tea Party pushed for heavy spending cuts when the economy was weak, needlessly depressing output and keeping the unemployment rate high. The International Monetary Fund, which supports long-run deficit reduction, declared in June that the U.S. program was “excessively rapid and ill-designed.” It nearly tipped the economy into recession, says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics (MCO). The Congressional Budget Office estimated in September that waiving spending caps now would create about 800,000 jobs by the end of 2014. What’s worse, the cuts the Tea Party achieved have come almost entirely on the discretionary side of the budget, choking everything from medical research to antipoverty programs to food inspection. Discretionary spending is the most vulnerable because it must be appropriated annually. The Tea Party, and Washington in general, have scarcely touched the real problem: entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are on track to soak up huge portions of the national income in coming decades. ..
Posted on: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 01:42:11 +0000
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