The looming government “slowdown” is distinct from the debt ceiling, which is in turn distinct from the United States going bankrupt. The issue is whether the government has the legal authority to spend money on non-essential services. The debt ceiling is about whether it can legally borrow more money. The debt ceiling will come up in the next 2-4 weeks, as the government would have run out of all available accounting tricks allowing them to pay the bills – it would have to do so selectively afterwards.
It appears as though the Republicans in Congress will continue to bargain as long as they can. They have the public and media discussing the efficacy of Obamacare again, which they view as a win. Applying multiple small stop-gap measures to finish out the year in order to keep the media discussion going would then seem ideal to them. Admittedly there are enough things that Obama and advocates of Obamacare claimed at the beginning which are no longer true (being able to keep existing health plan, the typical family saving $2500/year – in actuality they’re paying $700 to $800 more, according to Chris Conover), that some more discussion is warranted. In line with the adage “it’s better to stop bad laws than to make good ones”, delays, questions and doubts about Obamacare are fine with us. To be clear, there are severe problems with our healthcare and health insurance systems (the obfuscation of the two over the past few years has been extremely detrimental to proper discussion). However, there were much better ways to go about alleviating the problems. Instead we have a corporatist’s dream of the entire country being forced to buy insurance from one of the historically more anti-capitalistic industries around – bringing the worse parts of “big business” and big government ever closer together.
Would a “slowdown” be good in the existing situation? On the whole, it’s unlikely. It seems to be more of an inconvenience than anything. And other factors such as market reactions and international concerns are likely to be negative (not that we should specifically legislate for those other factors). Congress controls the purse strings for a reason, and this is another small incidence in a long and continuing line of politicking. It’s not necessarily irrational on anyone’s part. The rules of the game are different in D.C. and different incentives can lead to some strange outcomes. The Democrats in the Senate can block the continuing resolution, frame the debate such that the Republicans take the blame for anything bad that happens, and in turn get more support for whatever they see fit to do in the future. The Republicans can muddle through with as little as possible passing, until the next election where they hope to gain a few more Senate seats to help do what they want.
If we do come to a shutdown? I assume it’ll be like any other morning – I’ll still wake up to the sun rising in the east, stroll over to Pavement for some coffee, notice stray cats and dogs still fighting, and then head over to Snell to voraciously read the chapters that I didn’t get done the night before. In other words: nothing to see here, move along folks.
Peter Wilson
NU Libertarians, President
