Elect Republicans, kill the economy

As the kids say, shit just got real. The sequester cuts that were never supposed to happen because they were so awful everybody would want to stop them are now being embraced by the GOP as a great win for the party. Republicans, especially the crackpot caucus, are now crowing about how they cowed that uppity President and his false alarms about calamity. Guess when you live in a self-constructed reality, it's easy to believe the voices in your head whispering about sweet success.

Or maybe they just didn't know how quickly the cuts were going to kick in. Already the spending cuts are hitting the people back home. In my little corner of the world, this is a big deal:

The Charlotte Observer notes, “Closing the control tower at Concord Regional Airport could cost the city hundreds of charter flights from NASCAR teams and other businesses, local officials said Wednesday after learning that the tower’s federal funding is being eliminated. … Concord officials said they were notified Tuesday by the Federal Aviation Administration that funding would be cut off soon.”

Meanwhile, the Republicans in charge of the Statehouse are making big moves to take control of Charlotte Douglas International Airport away from the city and are quashing the long fought for expansion of inner city light rail transit. Even my obviously conservative local news anchors are beginning to sound appalled.

Then there's the national impact. We just saw the best jobs report in years this month, but next month job growth is likely to crash.

Merrill Lynch said this morning that job creation will likely shrink to below 100,000 in April and May as "sequester-related job cuts are implemented."

It doesn't take a Nobel prize winning economist to figure out you can't haphazardly cut $85 billion out of the economy and avoid crashing a still shaky recovery. Republicans have to know this, which is why they worked so hard at trying to foist off ownership of the sequester to Obama. But, despite the best efforts of the "liberal" media to help them, it didn't work. The only conclusions remaining are either they're so far out of touch with reality they don't see how this could backfire on them or they simply don't care.

[Ben Sargent cartoon]