Ogden, Utah
GEORGE PACKER NEW YORKER
Jenny Brown started working for the Internal Revenue Service right out of high school, in 1985, typing numbers from tax returns into a computer. Her home town, of Ogden, Utah, has not only a large I.R.S. facility but an Air Force base, Hill Field, where Brown’s father worked as a civilian. Her stepfather and her late sister used to work at the base; a brother, a son, and a nephew work there now. Her other son is with the Army in Afghanistan, and two other nephews are in the Air Force. “We’re really just a government family,” Brown said last week, on the second-to-last day of the shutdown. And Ogden is a government town, with twenty-four thousand federal employees. Brown grew up with the belief that a government job was secure, well-paying, and honorable, but, when she told her new doctor recently that she works for the I.R.S., he replied, in all seriousness, “Do you need a prescription for Xanax, or some kind of stress reducer?”
In fact, a lot of Brown’s colleagues, in Ogden and around the country, are taking pills for stress. They haven’t had a raise in three years. Every I.R.S. employee lost three days of pay last summer, owing to furloughs brought on by the blind budget cutting known as sequestration, and during the shutdown ninety per cent of the agency’s employees were sent home without pay. Many of them now live paycheck to paycheck, and some had to turn to food banks during the sixteen days of the shutdown, while the charity at the Ogden local of the National Treasury Employees Union (Brown is the president of Chapter 67) ran low on supplies. Nationally, the agency’s workforce has been cut by almost twenty-five per cent in the past two decades, while the number of individual tax returns filed has grown by an even larger figure.
With the extra workload, face-to-face audits have dropped by half since 1992, as have the odds of being convicted for a tax crime. Frank Clemente, the director of Americans for Tax Fairness, says, “When the I.R.S. doesn’t have the money to do its job, it’s easier for wealthy people and big corporations to cheat the system, especially by hiding profits offshore.” For every dollar added to the I.R.S. budget, the agency is able to collect at least seven dollars in revenue, but in times of austerity that money doesn’t come in—which means that, in recent years, the Treasury has lost billions in taxes, starving government services and increasing the deficit. Another result, Jenny Brown pointed out, is that wait times at the Ogden call center have risen from ten or fifteen minutes a few years ago to an hour or more today. “By the time they get the I.R.S. on the phone, they’re frustrated, and they vent awhile, which takes up more time,” she said
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.The government shutdown is over. National default has been averted, for now. According to an estimate by Standard & Poor’s, the Tea Party’s brinkmanship cost the American economy twenty-four billion dollars—more than half a percentage point of quarterly growth. House Republicans have suffered a huge tactical defeat of their own devising, and their approval ratings are at an all-time low. President Obama and the Democrats in Congress appear strong for refusing to give in to blackmail.
But in a larger sense the Republicans are winning, and have been for the past three years, if not the past thirty. They’re just too blinkered by fantasies of total victory to see it. The shutdown caused havoc for federal workers and the citizens they serve across the country. Parks and museums closed, new cancer patients were locked out of clinical trials, loans to small businesses and rural areas froze, time ran down on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law, trade talks had to be postponed. All this chaos only brings the government into greater disrepute, and, as Jenny Brown’s colleagues dig their way out of the backlog, they’ll be fielding calls from many more enraged taxpayers. It would be naïve to think that intransigent Republicans don’t regard these consequences of their actions with indifference, if not outright pleasure. Ever since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural, pronounced government to be the problem, elected Republicans have been doing everything possible to make it true.
These days, Republicans may be losing politically and resorting to increasingly anti-majoritarian means—gerrymandering, filibuster abuse, voter suppression, activist Supreme Court decisions, legislative terrorism—to nullify election results. But on economic-policy matters they are setting the terms. Senator Ted Cruz can be justly described as a demagogic fool, but lately he’s been on the offensive far more than the White House has. The deficit is in fairly precipitous decline, but job growth is anemic, and millions of Americans remain chronically unemployed. Democrats control the White House and the Senate, and last year they won a larger share of the national vote in the House than Republicans did. And yet the dominant argument in Washington is over spending cuts, not over ways to increase economic growth and address acute problems like inequality, poor schools, and infrastructure decay. “The whole debate over the last couple of weeks is playing against a backdrop of how much to increase austerity, not to invest in the economy,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said last week.
While House Republicans go home to sift through the debris of their defeat, the sequester remains in place, with deeper cuts ahead. A hiring freeze at United States Attorneys’ offices will continue and they will have to go on using volunteers. There will be no new agents to fill training classes at the F.B.I. Academy, while the bureau’s concrete headquarters, on Pennsylvania Avenue, crumbles. The loss of government scholarships at the National Health Services Corps will mean fewer doctors in underserved areas. Jenny Brown’s friends and co-workers in Ogden will look for jobs in the private sector. Ms.Tanden said, “We are living in a time of government withering on the vine.”
GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST
So Congress has passed, and Obama has signed, legislation ending the government shutdown and lifting the debt limit. Obama and Dems won. But what, exactly, did they win? Dems won two victories on principle, but their implications for the future remain uncertain.
By holding the line amid tough conditions, Obama and Dems established that they will not negotiate on the terms Republicans are insisting upon — an important victory on principle. As Jonathan Cohn details convincingly, agreement on the importance of this principle is precisely why Obama and Dems were able to maintain unity throughout.
Democrats also won a second victory on principle: They forced Republicans to allow a majority to prevail in the House. The outsized influence the conservative wing wields over the GOP leadership — preventing a vote on something that would pass with Democrats – combined with that bloc’s insistence on threat of destruction to force Dems to accept the unacceptable, caused the paralysis. But the outcome revealed GOP leaders would cast off both under severe political duress, breaking the conservative Republican ”legislative cartel.”
The question is whether this will matter for upcoming budget talks and for the government shutdown and debt limit deadlines next year. That will turn on whether GOP leaders are really prepared to resist the conservative wing’s insistence on more of the same later. I’ve laid out why Dems don’t expect a rerun of debt limit extortion. Brian Beutler also is skeptical of a rerun. But this remains to be seen.
On budget talks, the future will turn on whether this battle has left enough non-Tea Party Republicans so fed up with House GOP chaos governing that they will agree to compromises with Dems that will infuriate the right. Some 87 House Republicans voted with Dems last night.
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There are still no signs even sensible Senate Republicans are ready to give on another core difference between the parties — over the need for new revenues. And the sequester gives Republicans leverage going into the talks. So there’s no telling whether yesterday’s Dem win will translate into a long term thaw. But it was an important victory on principle nonetheless — one that does make future progress more likely, even if it doesn’t guarantee it.
Buried in the Post’s overview of the resolution to the crisis is this matter-of-fact tidbit:
Enforcement of the debt limit is suspended until Feb. 7, setting up another confrontation over the national debt sometime in March, independent analysts estimated.This is key: it signals that the next debt limit deadline is likely to be deeper into 2014 than the February 7th deadline indicates, thanks to Treasury measures (indeed, it’s likely to be later than March). This will only make a confrontation over it harder politically for the GOP.