Why Pay Congress?

If we careen over a cliff on Friday and the American government shuts down, hard-working federal workers will stop getting paychecks, but the members of Congress responsible for the shutdown are expected to be paid as usual. 

That’s partly because Congressional pay is not subject to the regular appropriations process, and partly because of Constitutional concerns. The Senate passed a bill proposed by Barbara Boxer of California that would suspend Congressional paychecks in any government shutdown, but the Republican-controlled House has blocked it. House Republicans approved a similar pay suspension, but it was embedded in legislation that has zero chance of becoming law.

The upshot is that federal workers who do important work for the public — cleaning up toxic waste, enrolling sick people into lifesaving medical trials, answering medical hot lines, running national parks, processing passport applications — risk being sent home and going unpaid. But members of Congress would continue to receive $174,000 a year. As the humorist Andy Borowitz wrote in a Twitter message:  “That’s like eliminating the fire dept & sending checks to the arsonists.”

In my travels lately, I’ve been trying to explain to Libyans, Egyptians, Bahrainis, Chinese and others the benefits of a democratic system. But if Congressional Republicans actually shut down the government this weekend, they will be making a powerful argument for autocracy. Chinese television will be all over the story.

If a high school student council refused to approve a budget so that student activities had to be canceled — even as student leaders continued to pay themselves stipends — a school board would probably cancel the entire experiment in student democracy. But I can’t imagine high school students acting so immature.

Some Republicans seem motivated to accept a government shutdown not only by a terror of the Tea Party wing of their party but also by a profound misunderstanding of fiscal policy.

“Our generation’s greatest challenge,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican, declared in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal the other day, “is an economy that isn’t growing, alongside a national debt that is.”

A fair number of Republicans share that sentiment, so let’s take a closer look. To nitpick, it’s factually wrong. The economy has been growing since the third quarter of 2009. The larger point is true. The economy is still sputtering, unemployment is too high and debt is growing.

But one of the most basic principles of economics is that when an economy is anemic, governments should use deficit spending as a fiscal stimulus, even though that means an increase in debt. If Senator Rubio believes that the response to a weak economy is to slash spending, he is embracing the approach that Herbert Hoover discredited 80 years ago.

Republicans are correct that debt matters and that we need to address America’s long-term deficits. That means trimming entitlement programs and reducing the rise in health care spending that is eroding their viability; we also probably need some tax increases. But while our long-term need is to rein in deficit spending, our short-term need is to boost it. That’s why sensible budget plans involve a short-term stimulus combined with long-term trims that take effect when the economy is healthy again.

The Republican plan to address debt right now, in an economic trough, echoes the horrendous mistake Japan made in the mid-1990s just as it was emerging from its own deep recession. Japan collapsed right back into what became its “lost decade” and now realizes that it should have nurtured a recovery before addressing its debt problem.

I was living in Japan then and referred to the prime minister on the front page of The New York Times as “Herbert Hoover” Hashimoto. So it only seems fair to refer now, if the shutdown occurs, to the current speaker of the House as “Herbert Hoover” Boehner.

Imagine how disastrous it would be if the Republicans shut down government for any length of time. Unpaid federal employees would cut back on shopping. Some would miss house payments. Family members might drop out of college. The I.R.S. might not be able to deliver some tax refunds. Small businesses would stop getting government loans. In sum, after the Democratic stimulus, we would have the Republican drag.

Republicans are also threatening to refuse to raise the government debt ceiling. By July, that could mean a default on U.S. government bonds. The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, says that would be “catastrophic,” and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warns that we could see “a financial crisis potentially more severe than the crisis from which we are only now starting to recover.”

All this seems mind-bogglingly petty and pusillanimous. If members of Congress shut down government and trigger a new financial crisis, then they shouldn’t just have their own pay docked. They should also learn the discipline of a market economy and be fired by the public that they are betraying.