Remem­ber over last year or two, how Repub­li­cans repeat­edly threat­ened finan­cial dis­as­ter? Like high school drama queens in some teenage soap opera, they man­u­fac­tured one cri­sis after another. We’re on the verge of another series of show­downs. Get your score­cards ready.

Grover Norquist at a political conference in O...
High School Diva

To recap the story so far…

We had the debate over extend­ing the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2010. Repub­li­cans insisted we needed to main­tain those tax cuts, espe­cially for the wealthy, or else in a fit of piqué the spoiled rich kids would pick up their mar­bles and stop cre­at­ing jobs. Part of the deal for extend­ing the cuts included expan­sions of Pell grants for col­lege stu­dents and a tem­po­rary reduced pay­roll tax for America’s work­ing people.

Then, in April of 2011, Amer­ica found itself on the verge of a gov­ern­ment shut­down. 800,000 fed­eral work­ers came within a hair’s breadth of being tem­porar­ily out of work. The spend­ing appro­pri­a­tions finally passed, after an unnec­es­sary soap-​​opera-​​like drama. Then we had the debt ceil­ing debate the fol­low­ing sum­mer. Repub­li­can reluc­tance to raise the debt limit to finance the spend­ing they’d already approved resulted in the first-​​ever down­grade of the US credit rat­ing. The even­tual deal included the cre­ation of a “Super­com­mit­tee” charged with find­ing nearly two tril­lion dol­lars in addi­tional debt reduction.

The Super­com­mit­tee failed, due to Repub­li­cans refusal to con­sider even one dime in addi­tional taxes. (Thank you, Grover Norquist, the de facto czar of America’s tax pol­icy.) This means we have mas­sive auto­matic bud­get cuts set to kick in begin­ning in January.

Many of these bad deals are com­ing back to haunt us. The sequel approaches. (more…)