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On the brink of government shutdown -- again
The U.S. Capitol dome is seen behind a temporary fence in Washington, D.C.
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Bob Moon: Don't bother stopping me, 'cause I know we've heard this one before: Congress is scrambling to avoid a government shutdown.
This has already played out -- and been narrowly averted -- twice this year. Now, lawmakers are paralyzed over how to pay for disaster relief. Congress is on recess next week. So if there's no agreement over this weekend, the federal lights go out on October 1st. Which has businesses wondering and worrying anew whether total government dysfunction is now the new normal.
Marketplace's David Gura reports.
David Gura: Karen Petrou advises big banks and private equity investors. She's paid to explain the ways of Washington.
Karen Petrou: What they want to know is, what is the government going to do?
So they can figure out how to invest their money. These days, Petrou's clients are confounded by Congress.
Petrou: Bringing the country to the brink -- for fun, essentially -- is viewed by, at least the business people we speak with, as enraging.
Government contractors are most directly on the hook.
Stan Soloway: If there is a shutdown, this is the sector of the economy that gets hit the hardest.
That's Stan Soloway. He heads the Professional Services Council, a contractor trade association. Soloway says these companies need predictability they're not getting.
Soloway: So from any business perspective that creates tremendous challenges.
They're worried about getting paid now and in the future. As the government fights over long-term funding, contracts are up in the air.
Dan Meckstroth is with the Manufacturers Alliance. He says this hold-up in contracts has a ripple effect, from the government to contractors, to other companies.
Dan Meckstroth: Whether they're directly related to the government contract, or they're just in the supply chain of a government contract.
Because manufacturers make a lot of the components government contractors use. This is really all about how to get companies to invest and grow. Karen Petrou says that's hard with this -- the new normal.
Petrou: The money, the prudent money, is on the sidelines. And I don't know how to get it out until Congress can get its act together.
In Washington, I'm David Gura for Marketplace.
If the economy is paralyzed whenever the government shuts down, this is a problem---and the problem is that the government and the economy are too intertwined. A reduction in government spending should have no measurable effect on the economy, and government regulation should impose comparatively little burden on the economy.
I also note that, as usual, conservatives are getting demonized as deliberately causing this, while it should be obvious to anyone with the sense God gave geese that a) too much spending got us into our present crisis, b) we elected representatives who campaigned on stopping runaway spending and little else for the first time in recent memory, and c) this possible shutdown is caused by representatives refusing on principle to increase spending without paying for it---exactly what we said we wanted them to do, and they promised to do on the campaign---and senators refusing on principle to cut spending, which is, again, what got us into this mess. And I also note that the reason this is a continuing resolution is that the Democrat-controlled Senate *still* hasn't passed a budget, which the House did as soon as Republicans took over, after the Democrats failed in that simplest of duties for two years running. Don't blame the tea party---who are in any case doing *exactly* what they promised to do on the campaign, defying pressure from the bureaucratic-industrial complex that is worrying about a government shutdown; instead, place the blame where it belongs, on Harry Reid and the Democratic Party, which *still* hasn't passed a budget.
I agree with Steve and Jay's comments below: it's a bit much for corporate America to complain about the uncertainty created by a monster of their own making, namely the Tea Party. Reducing taxes and regulations is not a policy choice as much as it is political religion.
The Tea Baggers and their cronies in Congress hate government. Their overarching goal is to make government look like a perpetual failure, whatever the cost to the American people and businesses. Their continued intransigence is just a tool in their toolchest to reaching that goal.
By the way, if we in the US have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and Tea Baggers hate government, then whom they really hate?
Earlier this year I wrote my elected officials in DC asking them to propose a bill docking their salaries of a budget doesn't get passed in time. It looks like I need to remind them of my request because someone obviously isn't doing their job. Again.
Awww... the business community is "enraged" and nervous and uncertain and blah, blah, blah.
What do you want to bet that the poor business people who are lying curled up in frightened, fetal balls on the floor consistently contribute to, and support and vote for republicans?
Their complaining and whinging is laughable. The intransigent, malevolent politicians that they support are the very cause of the frozen, unproductive economy we currently have, and the purpose of the economic stall that they whine about is the obsession that republican's have with making Obama look bad enough so that they have a chance of winning the White House in 2012.
That's it. They can be enraged at Congress all they want, but if they really wanted productivity and some semblance of a positive future, they would get behind programs that would support economic stimulation that would fuel investment, construction and the rebuilding of rotting American infrastructure.
Sorry, no sympathy for the titans of commerce, these disasters of the universe who talk a lot of talk, but always end up supporting the albatross they have hung around their own necks.
In this item I find it remarkable that Marketplace fails to report a salient fact, without which the story makes no sense whatever: the identity of the parties holding American government hostage.
Does the name "Tea Party" have any meaning to you?
It's not "Congress" that is the culprit here but a faction of the Republican Party, the Tea Party caucus and its fellow travelers, which is playing "chicken" with the government and, hence, the entire economy yet again.
