Month: October 2013

In recent weeks, Capitol Hill has been fixated on two major deadlines to pass important legislation. One was October 1, when spending authority ran out for many federal operations causing a partial government shutdown because Congress did not enact legislation to continue to fund those programs. The second deadline, which is much more serious, is October 17, when the U.S. debt will reach the existing $16.7 trillion debt ceiling set in federal law, making it impossible for the federal government to entirely meet obligations like Social Security payments and debt payments.

The government shutdown is tragic because it needlessly closes down public services and removes money from the economy with no benefit whatsoever. Breaching the debt ceiling would be catastrophic because it would lead the U.S. to default on its debt obligations, which is difficult to even fathom because much of the global economy is based on U.S. debt (on U.S. Treasury bonds).

Recent reports are that the government shutdown may continue on for some days and some lawmakers may attempt to link legislation to open the government with legislation to raise the debt ceiling.

The two posts below address some important aspects of this situation that you may not have heard about regarding both the shutdown and the debt ceiling.

What You Need to Know about the Government Shutdown

What You Need to Know about the Debt Ceiling

Congressional Democrats have already capitulated to Republican demands on what level of spending should be enacted to keep the government running.

The last government shutdown, which stretched from the end of 1995 into the start of 1996, happened because the parties disagreed about the size of the spending bills that would keep the government funded. Wherever you stand on that issue, you can logically see how such a disagreement might result in no spending bills being approved and a consequent shutdown of the government.

But this year, Democrats have already agreed to the level of spending proposed by the Republicans, at least in the short-term.

Congress has failed to enact the appropriations bills that are supposed to fund federal government operations (in some cases because Republicans could not support the low funding levels they earlier committed to.) But this happens frequently and is addressed by passage of a “continuing resolution” that provides short-term funding to whatever programs and agencies need it until Congress is able to work something out.

The “continuing resolution” (CR) approved by the Democratic-led Senate would keep the government funded for another six weeks — at the levels demanded by Republicans. As the Center for American Progress has explained, if the spending level of the CR was continued for the whole year it would amount to $986 billion in discretionary spending (the part of government spending Congress must approve each year). That’s roughly the same as the $967 billion called for in the most recent “Ryan budget” (the House budget resolution, named after House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan).

That’s considerably lower than the $1,058 billion that the Senate sought to spend in the budget resolution it approved in the spring, and much lower than the $1,203 billion in spending in 2014 that President Obama called for in his first budget proposal.

Once the Republican spending level is agreed to for the short-term CR, it is far more likely that Congress will continue funding the government at that same level for the rest of the year.

Put a different way, Congressional Democrats have basically conceded that sequestration of funding for federal programs under the Budget Control Act (across-the-board spending cuts that no one thinks make any sense) would remain intact for the time being. 

So if the parties essentially agree on the spending level, what is the problem? That brings us to the next point…

Congressional Republicans in the House (or a faction of them) have refused to approve the spending legislation needed to keep the government running unless it also includes provisions on the completely unrelated issue of health care reform.

The House Republicans approved a version of the CR that defunded the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as Obamacare). The health care reform law is not even funded by this spending legislation, and in fact its implementation has proceeded this week even while other parts of the government shut down. In other words, Obamacare is a completely unrelated issue that the House Republicans have tacked onto their CR.

The Democrats in the Senate voted to send a “clean CR,” a CR without the health care provisions, to the House. The House then approved a CR with provisions that would delay for one year, rather than defund, the health care reform. (Many Republicans acknowledged that this delay would eventually lead to repeal of the law.)

In addition to the one-year delay of health care reform, this CR also included a provision that would repeal one piece of that health care reform — a tax on medical devices designed to get some of the businesses that would profit from the law’s expansion of health coverage to contribute to support it. Another CTJ post explains why repealing the medical device tax is a terrible idea.

The Democratic majority in the Senate rejected this Republican House-passed CR as well.

The government shutdown does not actually save money and probably increases the budget deficit.

The shutdown that occurred in 1995-1996 actually cost the government $2 billion in today’s dollars. There are a lot of reasons for this. Furloughed federal workers received back pay for the time they were out of work during the shutdown, but even if federal workers don’t receive back pay this time around, it’s not likely that the shutdown will reduce the deficit. Part of that is because of the various fees (for inspections, visas, entrance at national parks) that won’t be collected, as well as the costs of reopening agencies and programs after they’ve been closed.

A prolonged shutdown could reduce economic output generally — fewer people with paychecks means fewer consumers buying goods, which in turn means fewer profits for businesses and less income for people employed by those businesses. This lost income, and the lost taxes that would be collected on that income, is another reason to worry that the shutdown will increase, rather than decrease, the deficit.

The need for Congress to increase the existing $16.7 trillion debt ceiling by October 17 does not involve increasing the deficit or spending but rather allows the government to issue debt to cover the costs of legislation that Congress has already enacted — including interest payments on existing debt.

In most governments around the world, any time a legislature approves spending or tax cuts that create a deficit or increase the deficit, the central bank is authorized to issue whatever debt is needed to accomplish this. The U.S. has a strange law, arising mainly out of a historical accident, which bars the federal government’s debt from rising above a certain level — even though the debt may be on course to blow through that limit because of the spending measures and tax cuts already enacted by Congress.

It’s generally been recognized that it would be irrational for Congress to refuse to raise the debt ceiling when it is necessary to carry out legislation already enacted by the same Congress. Past votes against debt ceiling increases were considered “message” votes, cast when it was clear that the increase would pass both chambers and be signed by the President. (And contrary to claims of Congressional Republicans, most deficit-reduction bills are enacted separately from the debt ceiling increases.)

That changed in 2011, when Congressional Republicans refused to increase the debt ceiling unless President Obama gave them “concessions” (which is a strange word to use when these “concessions” are in return for avoiding a debt default that would cause economic catastrophe for all of us). The concession given by the President was basically the spending caps and sequestration enacted as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011.

This event seems to have led Congressional Republicans to believe that threatening to cause the U.S. to default on its debt obligations is an effective and rational way to extract concessions from the President and the Democrats who control the Senate. This leads us to the next point…

House Republicans (or a faction of them) now refuse to raise the debt ceiling (in other words, threaten that the U.S. will default on its debt obligations) unless several unrelated parts of their legislative agenda are enacted.

The House Republicans have drafted a bill to raise the debt ceiling — and also enact a long list of items on the GOP agenda, including but not limited to: approving the Keystone pipeline, enacting tort “reform,” delaying health care reform for a year, means-testing Medicare, abolishing part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform, and setting up a process to enact a tax reform along the lines of the tax provisions in the most recent Ryan budget. This is the same Ryan tax plan that would provide millionaires with an average tax cut of at least $200,000 annually, as explained in a CTJ report. 

There are extremely strong legal arguments that if the debt ceiling is not raised in time, the President should declare that the debt ceiling itself is illegal and ignore it.

If Congress fails to enact an increase in the debt ceiling before October 17, the President will face laws that contradict each other: on the one hand, laws requiring money to be spent on various programs and debts to be paid, and on the other hand, the debt ceiling which will bar him from borrowing the funds necessary to do this. So if the debt limit is not increased, then President Obama will have to violate the law one way or another. Several government experts and attorneys have examined this issue and concluded that if the President must ignore one of these laws, he should ignore the debt ceiling.

This also makes the most sense as a matter of policy. If the debt ceiling is breached and the President does not ignore it, that will mean that one chamber of Congress can use periodic threats of default to control the executive branch of government, which would completely upend the Constitutional arrangement of separation of powers.

States are just beginning to come to terms with the impact that the shutdown of the federal government will have on state residents. This informative blog post from the Wisconsin Budget Project tells us what programs folks should and shouldn’t be worried about on the state level and links to several resources from The Center on Law and Social Policy (CLASP) that readers might find helpful.

Another day…another company asking for enormous state corporate tax breaks. This time Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) is asking Illinois lawmakers for $20 million in tax breaks to keep their headquarters in Decatur. During a House Revenue and Finance Committee hearing, Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie characterized testimony of an ADM executive as “essentially blackmailing the state … saying if you don’t go through this hoop for us, we may think about going somewhere else.”  (H/T POLITICO’s Morning Tax.)

The Tax Foundation and the National Taxpayers Union are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case that could allow Overstock.com — and other online vendors like Amazon.com — to shirk  their responsibility for collecting state and local sales taxes. While a previous Supreme Court precedent bars states from requiring sales tax collection by vendors who have no “physical presence” in the state (a ban which Congress is considering lifting via the Marketplace Fairness Act, which passed the Senate by a rare bipartisan vote in May), some states have chipped away at e-tax-evasion by interpreting “physical presence” more broadly than others. In New York, for example, Overstock.com has agreements with in-state affiliates to pay for customer referrals, thus requiring the company to collect sales taxes from its New York customers under a 2008 state law that has been upheld by the New York Court of Appeals. While a national solution that levels the playing field between all online vendors and the brick-and-mortar stores who have always collected sales tax is preferable, states should be free in the meantime to require sales tax collection from online retailers who have legitimate ties to their local economies. Hopefully the Supreme Court agrees.

Having already made some backwards moves on the tax policy front, New York Governor Cuomo now appears to be abandoning his commitment to study and improve the state’s tax structure. In December, he announced the New York State Tax Reform and Fairness Commission. The Commission was “charged with addressing long term changes to the state tax system and helping create economic growth.” But instead of going forward with this thorough examination, the Governor has just appointed former Governor George Pataki and Controller Carl McCall to head a task force whose sole objective is to find a way to cut between $2 and $3 billion in taxes next year, in just one year! Maybe the junior Cuomo really does plan on running for President — of Texas.