It’s sim­ple. It’s bad spend­ing if I don’t want it, and good spend­ing if I do want it.

I lis­tened for a while yes­ter­day to a record­ing of Con­gres­sional tes­ti­mony on the expected effects of the upcom­ing seques­tra­tion of defense funds. Tes­ti­fy­ing before the House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee last Tues­day were the CEOs from Lock­heed Mar­tin, Euro­pean Aero­space Defense Sys­tems (EADS), Pratt and Whit­ney, and a small aero­space busi­ness, Williams-​​Pyro.

I was struck pri­mar­ily by the immen­sity of Repub­li­can hypocrisy.

What hap­pened, if you remem­ber, is that last sum­mer, Con­gres­sional Tea Party mem­bers thought they could extort bud­get cuts by refus­ing to raise the debt ceil­ing (which allows the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to pay the bills Con­gress has already approved). An agree­ment finally was reached that the ceil­ing would be raised — but the cost was the Con­gress would appoint a spe­cial super­com­mit­tee (the United States Con­gress Joint Select Com­mit­tee on Deficit Reduc­tion, or NAMBLA) whose job it was to find around $2 tril­lion in deficit reduc­tion. Keep in mind, this was only after Repub­li­cans rejected Pres­i­dent Obama’s pro­posal of $4 tril­lion in deficit reduc­tion.

As incen­tive to actu­ally find $2 tril­lion in deficit reduc­tion, the deal required that around $1 tril­lion in cuts, half to mil­i­tary and half to domes­tic pro­grams, would be auto­mat­i­cally trig­gered begin­ning the first of next year if an agree­ment could not be reached. As it turned out, the super­com­mit­tee super­failed, because Repub­li­cans absolutely pos­i­tively unflinch­ingly refused to com­pro­mise. They wanted only to dic­tate their own terms, and to give up noth­ing.

Repub­li­cans now want to avoid the impend­ing auto­matic cuts — to mil­i­tary spend­ing. They don’t care about the domes­tic cuts (in fact, if the mil­i­tary cuts don’t hap­pen, the whole $1 tril­lion will fall on — and vir­tu­ally gut — domes­tic spend­ing). So the Repub­li­can lead­er­ship in the House is hold­ing hear­ings on how awful and rot­ten it would be if the mil­i­tary cuts actu­ally went into effect as scheduled.

They want to renege on the deal.

They want their intran­si­gence to have no con­se­quences they don’t like.

Wit­ness after wit­ness called to tes­tify before Con­gress on the effects of these agreed-​​upon cuts talked about how many jobs would be lost, how ter­ri­ble it would be for Amer­i­can mil­i­tary capa­bil­i­ties, how much dam­age it would do to their com­pa­nies and their sup­pli­ers. (All of the wit­nesses were CEOs of cor­po­ra­tions with mil­i­tary con­tracts. Appar­ently cor­po­ra­tions are the only peo­ple Repub­li­cans want to hear from.)

What a waste of time and of tax­payer dol­lars! Every­one knew these cuts would be bad. That was the whole point. Repub­li­cans had plenty of oppor­tu­nity to con­sider that last fall when they pre­vented the super­com­mit­tee from doing its work.

Oh, by the way, if you remem­ber Repub­li­can rhetoric dur­ing that cir­cus, they insisted that we needed to stop spend­ing money we don’t have. No dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion was made on whether we should con­sider the effects of the spend­ing, whether we should pri­or­i­tize the pro­grams to be cut. One got the impres­sion that Repub­li­cans imag­ined gov­ern­ment spend­ing con­sisted sim­ply of suck­ing in money like a magic vac­uum cleaner, and pro­duc­ing noth­ing. Gov­ern­ment spend­ing was bad, period.

Now that there are actual cuts loom­ing, Repub­li­cans want to rescind those cuts and spend that money any­way. Appar­ently, con­trary to their rhetoric from a year ago, at least some gov­ern­ment spend­ing serves a pur­pose, and we should actu­ally look at what the money is used for.

Remem­ber too how we’ve been told, for years, that gov­ern­ment spend­ing pro­duces noth­ing of value, no actual assets, no wealth (yes, they really say that). Yet wit­ness after wit­ness (and keep in mind, these were wit­nesses called by the Repub­li­can Con­gres­sional lead­er­ship) talked about how many jet fight­ers wouldn’t be built, how many tanks wouldn’t hap­pen, how much vital research into jet tech­nol­ogy wouldn’t be funded. One might think Repub­li­cans had been lying to us all these years.

Nor did the hypocrisy end there. These CEOs also spoke of how many jobs would be lost — hun­dreds from this plant which would shut down, hun­dreds from that sup­plier whose mate­ri­als would not be needed. We’ve been told that gov­ern­ment spend­ing cre­ates no jobs, espe­cially not in the pri­vate sec­tor. Appar­ently this isn’t true for gov­ern­ment spend­ing of which Repub­li­cans approve.

Some wit­nesses even warned that cuts to mil­i­tary spend­ing could slow the eco­nomic recov­ery, that these cuts were the wrong thing to do while Amer­ica was try­ing to come out of a reces­sion — as if gov­ern­ment spend­ing could be stim­u­la­tive. Wait…what?

There is hardly a point of Repub­li­can eco­nomic pro­pa­ganda that Repub­li­cans haven’t con­tra­dicted dur­ing this cha­rade. Well, per­haps one: no one sug­gested that rev­enues should be raised by increas­ing the his­tor­i­cally low tax rates that have placed 43 per­cent of Amer­i­can wealth into the hands of the rich­est one per­cent of Amer­i­cans and given 72 per­cent of our wealth to the top five per­cent. A whop­ping 83 per­cent of Amer­ica is owned by the top ten per­cent of Amer­i­cans. This immense accu­mu­la­tion of wealth at the top has hap­pened while salaries for the rest of us have flat­lined. The tax poli­cies that have con­tributed to this redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth weren’t mentioned…at least, not in the por­tion of the tes­ti­mony I heard.

Other than that — the whole argu­ment against fed­eral stim­u­lus, the argu­ment that gov­ern­ment doesn’t cre­ate jobs, the idea that Spend­ing Is Bad, even the con­cept that Repub­li­cans have the slight­est clue as to how to effec­tively gov­ern — all of this was irrev­o­ca­bly undermined.

I shouldn’t be sur­prised any more, but I still have this roman­tic notion that elected offi­cials should care about the good of the nation, rather than solely about irra­tional ide­ol­ogy or par­ti­san rhetoric. We can hope the mad­ness is tem­po­rary, and that Repub­li­cans will even­tu­ally see at least a lit­tle of the inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions inher­ent in their positions.

Related arti­cles