Extremists Ready To Damage US To Save It

In Genesis there is the story of Esau, who sold his birthright for a pottage of soup.

He’s a symbol for giving up something precious, for nothing.

We’ve just experienced an incredibly costly government shutdown because the rational center of the Republican Party gave in to Tea Party extremists who are willing to sabotage the entire economy for nothing. Let’s hope reasonable leaders can restore order to the conservative cause.

The Tea Party betrays conservative values. A conservative seeks to conserve, not to destroy. Let’s look at the spilled soup from this foolish shutdown.

Standard and Poor’s estimates the economic costs at $23 billion. A BBC report estimates when you factor in the long-term ripple effect of lost jobs and stalled economic growth, the shutdown will cost America’s economy hundreds of billions.

It all occurred just when good things were happening: the deficit was shrinking, unemployment was going down and the economy was gaining life.

Before the shutdown, the U.S. economy was growing at a 2.2 percent annual rate. The brief shutdown has defl ated growth by almost 30 percent, to a sluggish 1.6 percent, according to the global business information company IHS.

Moody’s expects the unemployment rate to rise from 7.3 percent to 7.8 percent - just under a million jobs lost - a huge human toll, especially when you think how long it has taken us to chip away at the recession’s unemployment.

This shutdown was incredibly damaging. And to what purpose? A flawed and futile attempt to defund the Aff ordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act is a classic American liberal-conservative compromise. It’s called “Obamacare” but it’s actually very similar to “Romneycare,” the Massachusetts health care law of 2006 signed by Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, and to Republican President Nixon’s 1974 CHIP proposal.

The Affordable Care Act is not what liberals and consumer advocates wanted. They wanted a single-payer universal system like Canada and most of Europe enjoys. The liberal plan would have been simpler and more economical. Conservative and liberal parties in Canada andEurope love and support their National Heath Care.

We already have something like that for our elderly. All Americans over 65 are already covered by Medicare. We already have basic universal health insurance for the most expensive period of our lives. How much easier it would have been just to extend Medicare to all Americans, maybe with a few tweaks to improve it a bit. But conservatives objected to what they called “socialized medicine.” So the two parties negotiated a pretty classic American private-public compromise - the Aff ordable Care Act.

I still think we would have been better off with a simple extension of Medicare to all. The infrastructure for enrollment and administration is already in place. Medicare delivers far more bang for the buck than any private insurance has delivered. It would have covered everyone, and the Affordable Care Act does not. It would have been easier, cheaper, more efficient and universally beneficial to all.

But my side didn’t win. Liberals and consumer advocates couldn’t convince conservatives to support Medicare For All. But, liberals didn’t threaten to shut down the government. They compromised. Congress passed the compromise - the Affordable Care Act. It became law and passed Supreme Court muster.

The Tea Party faction refused to accept the compromise law. Instead they pushed through a costly government shutdown, and they appeared willing to send the United States into default before calmer heads prevailed, for a while. We still face Jan. 15 and Feb. 7 decisions.

Here’s what the Tea Partiers are willing to risk:

According to the nonpartisan Peterson Foundation, a brief default quickly resolved would raise the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent and cost 2.5 million jobs. A longer crisiswould create a deep recession and 3.1 million jobs lost. That’s the damage the Tea Party radicals are willing to infl ict to get their way.

Tea Partiers say they are motivated by the national debt. We were decreasing the debt with annual surpluses during the last four years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But we roared into new deficits with President Bush’s tax cuts (mostly favoring the wealthy), two unfunded wars and a deep recession caused by relaxed regulation of the financial industry.

Should poor people or rich people pay for these bills? That’s the question.

For 30 years the tax code has shifted wealth and income toward the rich and powerful. Prosperity has not trickled down. It’s time to close the loopholes that benefi t the wealthy and return to the kind of progressive individual tax rates we had in the 1950s-1970s. Our economy functioned pretty well then.

LOWELL GRISHAM IS AN EPISCOPAL PRIEST WHO LIVES IN FAYETTEVILLE.