This is why I can never decide if they are more accurately described as nihilists (who don’t believe in anything, including science, evidence, or well-reasoned argument) or zealots (for whom ruining the federal government is the point).
On Thursday, the National Parks Service announced that furloughs would curtail services at such popular destinations as Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. And on Friday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood released a list of airfields that could close due to Federal Aviation Administration furloughs.
Conservatives were unimpressed. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan “fired more than 10,000 air traffic controllers. There could have been massive disruption. But there wasn’t,” said Chris Edwards, a budget expert at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Okay, then. Never mind that it took ten years to restore full staffing for our air traffic control system, as long as there was no “massive” disruption, then no biggie, right?
Chicken farmers in Delaware and Maryland are lobbying against cuts to food safety inspectors; the American Hospital Association is pushing to ease cuts to medical research; and defense industry executives have been prowling the halls of the Capitol for months.
But there’s no grand stop-the-sequester movement. And unless the public starts complaining, the AEI’s [John] Makin said Democrats’ best hope for persuading Republicans to reconsider the sequester may be a new recession. The sequester is forecast to slice 0.6 percentage points from economic growth this year, and destroy 750,000 jobs.
I like the word “destroy” in this context. Why sugarcoat it? The Republicans’ refusal to compromise at all, even a tiny bit, is going to destroy 750,000 jobs and possibly cause a recession. And they don’t care.
