| Congressional Republicans like my own representative, Mo Brooks, love to rail against the national debt. Last year they put on a big show of refusing to raise the debt ceiling. At the time, Brooks even asserted that the debt ceiling fight would improve our credit rating. “There should be no default on August 2,” Brooks said. “In fact, our credit rating should be improved by not raising the debt ceiling.”
Wrong-o. What they did was get America's credit rating lowered. As many of us suspected at the time, Republicans weren't doing diddly about the debt, it was all political theater. Expensive political theater. Repubicans might as well have spent the time burning money ... it would have been cheaper for taxpayers. That little spot of Republican play-acting cost taxpayers a minimum of $1.3 billion. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office said Monday that the $1.3 billion in costs came as the result of increased borrowing costs for the Treasury Department. The final cost is expected to climb higher as multi-year obligations and other outstanding costs are added later. ... For those of you who missed last summer’s political drama, lawmakers eventually agreed to raise the federal debt limit to $16.4 trillion, a $2.1 trillion increase that came with an agreement to cut a similar amount in federal spending over the next decade. Just under $1 trillion took the form of annual caps on agency spending. The rest is slated to come through even deeper, automatic cuts at the Pentagon and other agencies beginning in January.
Thanks, GOPers. Y'all spent wasted burned through $1.3 billion we didn't have, did zip to put the middle class back to work and managed to lower our credit rating -- which will cost us more down the road. Deficit hawks? Congressional Republicans are more like deficit hogs. Yeah, we're looking at you Robert Aderholt (R, AL-04), Spencer Bachus (R, AL-06), Jo Bonner (R, AL-01), Mo Brooks (R, AL-05), Martha Roby (R, AL-02) and Mike Rogers (R, AL-03). To put the icing on the cake, Republicans are now moaning and complaining about sequestration -- those automatic cuts to defense spending -- a key part of the budget compromise forged in response to the GOP-manufactured debt ceiling crisis. Seriously, do these guys ever take responsibility for anything? |
