Boehner Claims He Doesn't Know if Sequester Will Hurt Economy
As the deadline for the March 1 budget sequester approached, John Boehner made a surprising admission. Asked if he had "a sense of how many jobs will be lost as a result of the sequester," the Speaker of the House said, "I do not." On Sunday, Boehner once again proclaimed his ignorance in an interview with David Gregory on Meet the Press:
"I don't know whether it's going to hurt the economy or not. I don't think anyone quite understands how the sequester is really going to work."
Of course, there are no shortage of dire, specific and nonpartisan warnings about the impact this year of the $85 billion in cuts to defense and discretionary spending. And Speaker Boehner knows this, because over just the last three weeks he heard them directly from the heads of the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve.
John Boehner may not know how many jobs will be lost, but virtually everyone else in Washington does. On February 13, 2013, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf testified to the House Budget Committee about the economic blow from the first year of $1.2 trillion, decade-long sequester:
"The sequester alone will reduce GDP growth this year by 0.6 percentage points, lowering GDP at the end of the year by that 0.6 percent. We think that would reduce the level of employment at the end of the year by about 750,000 jobs."
And in his testimony to Congress last week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke echoed that warning:
The CBO estimates that deficit-reduction policies in current law will slow the pace of real GDP growth by about 1-1/2 percentage points this year, relative to what it would have been otherwise.
A significant portion of this effect is related to the automatic spending sequestration that is scheduled to begin on March 1, which, according to the CBO's estimates, will contribute about 0.6 percentage points to the fiscal drag on economic growth this year. Given the still-moderate underlying pace of economic growth, this additional near-term burden on the recovery is significant.
Moreover, besides having adverse effects on jobs and incomes, a slower recovery would lead to less actual deficit reduction in the short run for any given set of fiscal actions.
It's no wonder Bernanke lamented, "So it doesn't quite match to be doing tough policies today when the real problem is a somewhat longer-term problem."
While John Boehner pretends to be in the dark about the economic body blow from the sequester, his Democratic counterparts shed plenty of light during their February 14 press conference. Between them, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and ranking Budget Committee Democrat Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) mentioned the 750,000 lost jobs a total of 11 times.
Of course, when in doubt, Speaker Boehner could just check the text of his February 20 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. After all, it starts with the sentence, "A week from now, a dramatic new federal policy is set to go into effect that threatens U.S. national security, thousands of jobs and more."
The budget office sent Boehner a detailed letter of the effects of the sequester, I think 83 pages, it is on the White House web site, so if he says he does not know, he is lying!