Congress put on quite a show

Tea Party members got the Speaker of the House to accept one of their key demands for reopening the government: requiring Congress and their staff to give up the employer contribution to their health care plans and pay full price.

The would have put Democrats in the position of risking default just for the sake of preserving a discount for the hated US Congress.

But before it even got to the Democrats, Tea Party members rejected their own compromise because it would have raised debt ceiling into next year. Unacceptable said Tea Party Republican Tim Huelskamp.

“No, we can raise it for a few weeks, problem is we have folks that don’t want to ever cut spending, that is the real issue here.”

The Tea Party says Obamacare will create massive deficits.

“About $50 billion more dollars of spending in the next year alone,” said Huelskamp.

Which does sound like a lot. Until you do what the CBS Evening News did.

“We asked the research firm Moody’s Anayltics and they told us that the government shutdown and the risk of default have cost the U.S. economy $22 billion just this last two weeks.”

At that pace, by the end of the month, the cost of the shutdown will be higher than the first year of Obamacare.

So in addition to closing monuments and furloughing thousands of employees who will be paid anyway, we also just lit fire to a $22 billion pile of money.

We probably would’ve just squandered it anyway on stuff like rent, and mortgage payments.