Free Exchange: AMERICA has a debt ceiling. It’s a statutory limit on how much debt the federal government can issue. For most of its existence (the ceiling will turn 100 next year) Congress has simply voted to raise the limit when borrowing threatens to hit it. In 2011 and 2013, however, Republicans in Congress chose a different approach. They threatened not to vote to raise the ceiling unless various budget demands were met. It was a dangerous course of action; had the ceiling not been raised the government would have found itself forced to choose between default—potentially triggering a massive financial crisis—or large, sudden cuts to spending of all sorts, triggering a deep recession.
What did the Republicans really do? They actually shut down the government. They did it to Bubba Clinton also.
What else do we know? We got four years of austerity in DC, and a budget surplus by Bubba along with a tax hike in both cases.
What else? Two regimes with arguably the best economic performance in the post war period. Measure them relative to their starting point.
The post assumes some Nash equilibrium of hysteria applies to us all.
No, a lot of us, out here on the edges, do quite a bit better when Republicans shut down Democratic regimes. We like it, we are Rednecks, and we been doing this stuff for 250 years, longer, that is why you still have a union back there, just barely.
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