Friday, October 1, 2021

Government Shutdown Déjà vu—Little New in Game of Economic Chicken With Murfin Verse

Playing chicken with of government shutdown and economic catastrophe. 

The United States narrowly averted a government shut down at the last minute yesterday.  If it seems like we have been there before you are not mistaken.  Going back to President Bill Clinton’s fights with Congressional Republicans in 1995 there have been 5 total or partial shutdowns laying off hundreds of thousands of Federal employees, closing vital services,  disrupting the lives of millions, and costing billions of dollars.  In 2013 a total shutdown to spite President Barack Obama lasted 15 days.  In 2018-19 the former Resident of the United States helped engineer the partial shut down of his own government lasting 35 days believing that voters would hold Congressional Democrats to blame.  He was wrong.  The stench fell on him and his party.     

A chart showing the length of government shutdowns since 1976 from just before the 2018-19 crisis ended at 35 days.

This time around with the Senate evenly divided requiring all Democrats and the Vice President to vote pass funding legislation to finance the government for its next fiscal year Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened to force Democrats to pass the authorization without Republican support knowing that two obstreperous allegedly moderate Democrats might not vote for the measure.  As the clock ticked down to the last moments and after furious negotiations an agreement was made.  Republicans were afraid to take the blame again while allowing their kamikaze crazies to make their symbolic vote to blow up the economy.

The Senate and House both passed a short-term appropriations bill that would keep the government running through December 3. The Senate approved the legislation in a 65-35 vote, with 15 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats. The House passed the bill by a 254-175 margin as 34 GOP representatives and every Democrat supported it.  Essentially they just kicked the ball down the road setting up a possible new crisis in two months.

A shutdown crisis was narrowly and temporarily averted this week but like a Christmas Carol ghost will be back to haunt us in December.

Earlier Democrats tried to fund the government and suspend the debt ceiling as part of the same bill. Senate Republicans blocked the legislation, even though extending the ceiling doesn’t authorize new spending. Approval would let the Treasury to cover its existing obligations.

Failure to raise the debt ceiling by October 18 when the Treasury will run out of money to pay its obligations and cause the nation to default on its debts for the first time could trigger a “financial apocalypse  including a stock market crash, banking collapses that would trigger a world-wide depression, soaring interest rates and chocking off business and consumer credit, an massive unemployment.

So naturally some Republicans seem content to let that happen to bring the whole system crashing down so that it can be replaced by supposed Randian utopia in which powerful elites can plunder undisturbed. 

All of this storm und drang comes as Democrats struggle to unite their progressives and alleged moderates in passing both Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill and his far more ambitious $3 trillion budget reconciliation bill including provisions like free preschool and community college, child-care subsidies, and an expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care.

Eight years ago today I posted a blog entry on the 2013 crisis that seems just as apt today.  Here it is.

Always reckless and feckless Texas Senator Ted Cruz was a major catalyst for the 2013 government shutdown which turned out to be a political disaster for Republicans.

Back in the ‘50’s guys with duck tails and souped-up Chevys played two kinds of games of chicken on the dark blacktops outside of town.  The classic game had two macho, testosterone fueled knights run full speed at one another until at the last minute one swerved out of the way, pee dribbling down his Levis.  Or not, in which case there would be a swell double funeral.

A rarer variant was immortalized in James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause—a side-by-side drag race toward a cliff.  As you will recall, Dean applied the brakes at the last second.  The other yahoo sailed serenely over the cliff to a fiery crash and oblivion.  Last night was that kind of game.  We could almost celebrate the cleaning up of the gene pool by the Republicans’ grandiose self-immolation, except that the rest of us were tied up, bound, and gagged in the trunk.

The long awaited/dreaded government shutdown is a signal to pundits and bloggers to analyze and opine with abandon.  The conduits of the interweb are clogged with it as I type.  The product ranges from right wing hair-on-fire hysterics and pants-on-fire lies, to solemn platitudes and phony even-handedness of the professional talking heads, to liberal/left commentary torn between blindly backing the President to sniping at him and unloading lots of impractical advice on him.

But here and there you can find a calm and rational analysis of what is happening, why, and various likely outcomes.  I urge you to find them.  They are all better than I could have done.

Instead I am moved to poetry.

Political verse has the shelf life of sushi on a pushcart in Phoenix in August.  It has a long and ignoble history since the days when long satirical ballads were printed anonymously in partisan newspapers, through righteous radicalism dripping with the blood of workers and peasants, to acid penned short pieces in the columns of Puck or The New Yorker. 

This is none of those, but read it fast before it evaporates from your screen.

 

This Morning

October 1, 2013

 

The sun rose this morning

            heedless of deadlines

            of wails and curses.

 

But that doesn’t mean

            we must sit idle

            with Zen-like equanimity.

 

The dew on the grass

            invites the first footprint.

 

The crystal air refreshes         

            our lungs.

 

The wind at our backs

            pushes us to action.

 

What they have done,

            is done.

 

What we will do

            is yet unwritten.

 

We have but one resolve—

            not to be pawns

            on their chessboard

            anymore.

 

—Patrick Murfin


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