Wash Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson sez: “Hey, those Republicans and those Democrats! They both need to grow up, amirite or amirite?”
Well, sure, Bob, but when it comes to your topic du jour, the national debt ceiling, it’s the Republicans, and only the Republicans, who need to grow up. Because it’s the Republicans, and only the Republicans, who have in the past tried to use the threat of allowing the U.S. to default on its debts as a way of forcing through substantive policy change without going through the normal, that is to say, the Constitutional, process.
Bob knows all of this, of course. He knows that the GOP’s repeated budget games—refusing to raise the debt ceiling and/or refusing to pass a budget—have significantly slowed the U.S. economy’s recovery from the Great Recession of 2009. Let Politico Chief Economic Correspondent Ben White tell the story:
“The toxic fiscal cycle — which began with a near default and the first-ever U.S. credit rating downgrade in the summer of 2011 — clearly slowed the recovery following the brutal financial crisis and recession.
“The fights, particularly the first debt limit scare and the “fiscal cliff” of 2012, depressed consumers and whipsawed the stock market. The government shutdown of 2013 shaved an estimated 1.5 percentage points from economic growth; the economy has struggled to stay above 2 percent annual growth throughout the recovery.
“‘These events clearly produced big hits to confidence and equity markets and hurt both Main Street and Wall Street,’ said Jim O’Sullivan of High Frequency Economics. ‘The presumption this time was that the debt limit stuff was just a bluff, but if that had been wrong it would have been very bad.’”
It is the Republicans, and only the Republicans, who have been playing “ruin and rule” games of chicken with U.S. fiscal policy, and Bob knows that as well as I do. But saying so, well, they don’t call Bob “Mr. No Balls” for nothing.
