This is why the Republican Party has ceased to function as a viable political option these days: the leadership seems not to understand its own basic economic platform or its consequences.
First, the Republicans created a massive federal deficit by slashing taxes and raising military spending. Remember, when Bill Clinton left office in 2000, the federal government had a surplus. Then, they contributed to the economic crash by insisting on deregulation of financial practices. (To be fair, Clinton and the Democrats were foolish enough to think deregulation was a good idea, and Clinton himself signed the laws putting it in place.
Then the GOP got smoked in the 2008 elections, and demanded that overnight the new president and Congress should repair the damage done over the course of eight years. They called for more tax cuts, more spending cuts, less federal investment in infrastructure, no federal support for health care reform and argued that all these cuts in spending would cause people to open their pocketbooks and drive the economy.
Turned out they were wrong. The biggest incentive to spending appears to be political stability, and when the federal government creates severe uncertainty by refusing to pass fundamental legislation like a federal budget, the economy suffers. The "fiscal cliff" and the "sequester" lead to doubt and therefore suppress investment, both by individuals and by industry -- and it's investment, not spending that causes economic growth.
The sequester ought to be just the ticket, according to the Republicans. It will cause immediate, across the board cuts in federal spending and services, and if the Republicans believed their own stories, they should be perfectly content to allow them to happen. The Tea Party should be ecstatic.
But instead of taking credit for the cuts, which are not nearly as deep as the ones they say they really want, they are blaming Obama and the Democrats for them. The Republican-controlled House has done absolutely nothing to avoid the sequester, and that's perfectly consistent with their supposed political theory. So what's the stink?
The problem is that the Republican Party is for fools, right now. There is no plan, there is no philosophy, there is not basic adherence to political or physical facts.
It does not have to be this way. There is a coherent, sensible agenda for the GOP to build. A lot of it I probably would dislike, but that's not a problem. The problem is that the Republicans prevent useful discourse because they act like morons, and there's no use talking politics with a moron.
