The Tea Party propaganda outlets have not let up on one particular moniker over the years. Obamacare is, we are constantly told, “job-killing.” John Boehner has used that phrase so often even Frank Luntz’s eyeballs must be slipping backward toward his tenuous toupee. The trouble is: since Obamacare just effectively started, and since the GOP has managed to cut off its provisions from the working poor – and particularly the African-American working poor – it’s somewhat hard to judge the validity of these claims:
“The script is still being written,” said Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics. “I don’t see any evidence Obamacare is impacting the job market.” N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who worked in President George W. Bush’s administration, agreed. Asked how much the Affordable Care Act had affected the economy so far, he said, “Probably not a whole lot.”
Compare that with the likely job-killing effects of a continued government shutdown and a federal default. There is no doubt about how many jobs they would kill. Economists are not saying things like “Probably not a whole lot.” They are saying the following:
Goldman estimates that a two-day shutdown would reduce growth in the fourth quarter by 0.1 percentage points at an annualized rate, while a week-long shutdown would cost 0.3 percentage points … Now consider the debt ceiling … Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch argue that hitting the ceiling would require the US to balance its budget at once, cutting spending by about 20 per cent, or 4 per cent of GDP. That would push the US into another recession–even if there were no default. The consequences of an actual default, particularly one that lasted for some time, are beyond prediction….
And this, if the GOP gets the default it is now recklessly threatening:
Expect nothing less than near panic in the global financial order.
The former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Simon Johnson, describes the repeated face-off over the debt ceiling and prospects for default as an act of “collective insanity,” noting that such irresponsibility in 2011, “put more pressure on European sovereign debt at an inopportune moment, pushing up yields across the troubled euro zone (including, but not limited to Greece).” Consequently, not just America’s recovery suffered. The risk substantially increased that Europe will now face a “lost decade” similar to that suffered by Japan with little or no economic growth.
The Republicans are not only threatening the mother of all job-killing recessions in America; they are threatening the rest of the developed world with a second Great Depression, the end of the dollar as a global reserve currency, a massive jump in interest rates and a sky-rocketing unemployment rate. In their fetid partisan brains, they may think this will hurt president Obama, and it surely would.
But it would also destroy countless lives, families, jobs, industries and American credibility. When will these people learn to love their country more than they hate their president?
The Dish 