Daily Austerity Watch (4/7/11) — The Shutdown Saga Drags On

To Daily Austerity Watch, the story of whether the federal government will shut its doors is unfolding like a bad movie, the kind that  makes Attack of the Killer Tomatoes seem like Citizen Kane.

In fact, if the story of the showdown between President Barack Obama and the Republicans in Congress were shown at multiplexes around the country, the audience would walk out in droves because the ending is a foregone conclusion.  Let’s go out on a limb here and boldly declare that the Congress will pass a budget …. eventually.  Every voter living from the Northern tip of Maine to the Southern most part of California knows this truth to be self-evident.  Obama knows this as does House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).    The Democrats and Republicans play this game of fiscal chicken every year, tough obviously the stakes are higher now.

When you look behind the rhetoric, it seems pretty obvious that the two sides could reach an agreement if they wanted to.  Politico reports that the parties are “only” several billion apart.  Talks held last night between Obama, Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) made some progress but not enough to reach an agreement..

The influential political website today lists three reasons why there won’t be a shutdown.  Most interesting of the reasons was psychological.  Boehner lacks the stomach for protracted and ultimately pointless political battles that may damage his party politically.  In 1995, then House  Speaker Newt Gingrich lead the charge to shut down the government and then was promptly outflanked politically by President Bill Clinton.  The price for Gingrich’s stubbornness  was much as $800 million according to government estimates. That makes the glee some Republicans are showing about a shutdown all the more difficult to fathom.  The conservative Republican Study COmmittee even has a countdown clock on its website.

As Ari Berman of The Nation writes on NPR.org, there are a plethora of reasons the budget process has ground to a halt.

“A mixture of Republican stubbornness and Democratic timidity has brought us to this point,” he writes. ” Democratic leaders could have passed a budget before the 2010 elections or during the lame-duck Congress, when they held large Congressional majorities, but by punting on the issue, they empowered the new House Republican majority, whose number-one issue in the 2010 election was cutting government spending.”

Republicans, for their part, have not helped matters by insisting on defunding programs that are dear to Democrats such as NPR and Planned Parenthood which are beyond trivial fiscally in terms of the federal budget.  House Budget Committee Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) didn’t help matters by proposing a draconian 2012 that liberals argue robs from the poor to give to the rich.  Democrats have done a good job of burying their heads in the sand about the $1.6 trilkion deficit.  They largely ignored the advice of the Presidential Deficit Commission even though it was bipartisan.

Ultimately, the solution to the budget impasse may be a simple.  Why not have the federal government enact a 2 year budget.   A few states,  including Texas and Iowa, do it.   Think of all the time and energy would be saved from hearing the same arguments on issues such as  entitlement reform repeated year after year.  Unfortunately, the idea is too sensible and will never see the light of day.  Too many people make too much money and gain too many political points under the current dysfunctional budget model for it to be fixed.

–Jonathan Berr