American Taxpayers Foot the Bill for Congressional Inaction

by Cynthia McCabe  |  August 01, 2012

Congressional inaction is maddening and leaves most of us yelling at our TVs. Now it turns out it comes with a hefty price tag, too.

Last summer’s fight over whether to raise the debt ceiling – a fight instigated by tea-party conservatives elected to Congress in 2010 – cost taxpayers $1.3 billion, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress that provides oversight of government spending.

The GAO determined that the delays in raising the nation’s debt ceiling (our limit on how much we can borrow money as a country) created uncertainty about America’s fiscal strength, leading to higher borrowing costs. Translation: Grandstanding by conservative politicians threatening to default on our debts made our country look like a credit risk. Lenders decided they should charge us more to borrow money.

Lawmakers ultimately increased the debt limit last August. The Atlantic’s Jack M. Galkin reminds us, “people around the world surely must have wondered whether politicians in the United States had gone mad. They were threatening to default on the nation's debt and destroy the world economy.”

Balkin goes on to point out that the tea-party conservatives’ fiscal hostage taking resulted in a downgrade of the country’s credit rating. Economists believe it hampered the nation’s recovery from the Great Recession, too. That’s all on top of the $1.3 billion it cost.

What could that $1.3 billion have been spent on? Try 27,779 firefighters, 26,353 librarians, 19,589 registered nurses, 27,810 police and sheriff’s patrol officers, 47,498 school bus drivers, and 53,320 teacher assistants.

Although House Majority Leader John Boehner had promised more of the same this summer as a government shutdown approached in September, House and Senate leaders reached a deal Tuesday to fund government for the next six months.