Speaker Boehner doesn't have the numbers

By G.I. | WASHINGTON

HOUSE Speaker John Boehner is fond of saying that a debt-ceiling deal that raises taxes cannot pass the House of Representatives. Slice the numbers a bit more carefully and you can easily conclude the opposite: a deal that doesn't raise taxes won't pass, either.

Why is this? Mr Boehner's party controls 240 of the 435 seats in the house. That means that if more than 22 of his members vote against a deal, he will need some Democrats to pass it. I don't know of any precise count of Republicans who have sworn to vote against any increase in the debt ceiling. But Chuck Conlon, the veteran budget guru over at CQ (a sister publication of The Economist) points me to the Republican Study Committee's “Cut-Cap-Balance” letter. Its 103 signers imply they won't vote to raise the ceiling unless three conditions are met: halving of the deficit via spending cuts next year; implementation of a statutory spending cap of 18% of GDP; and a balanced-budget amendment to the constitution. (The letter is here; the signatories are here.)

Needless to say the odds even one of these conditions are met, much less all, are close to zero. The signatories have left themselves wiggle room. But even if Mr Boehner got the $2 trillion, spending-cuts-only deal that his deputies were angling for in their negotiations with Joe Biden, it seems likely many of these Republicans would vote against it.

For precedent consider the continuing resolution in April that narrowly averted a government shutdown. By any reasonable accounting the Republicans got more than they gave up; budget authority in 2011 was cut by $40 billion from actual spending in fiscal 2010, and by $78 billion from Mr Obama's 2011 budget request; Republicans had wanted $100 billion. Yet revelations that much of that spending wouldn't have occurred anyway infuriated many Tea Party members, and 59 voted against the final resolution. It passed with the support of 81 Democrats.

Getting Democrats to vote for a deficit-reduction deal that slashes sacred programmes and doesn't touch taxes will be a stretch. Conceivably enough Democrats in the Senate could be cobbled together for such a deal, but who in the House, after the culling of so many conservative members in last fall's election, would want to defend such a vote in November, 2012? So rhetoric aside, the Republicans can't afford to close the door completely to higher taxes. This may explain the mixed messages coming from their leadership on whether eliminating tax breaks, as Mr Obama proposes, constitutes a tax increase. John Kyl implies no; Mitch McConnell implies yes.

As my colleague at Democracy In America points out, it's in Mr Boehner's political interest to dig in as long as possible. Yet he can use the Tea Party's intransigence as an excuse not to negotiate for only so long. First, he cannot count on Mr Obama knuckling under and persuading his party to follow suit; they may ignore him. As one Republican pundit told me, “The Democrats have their jihadists, too.” Second, the closer you get to the debt-ceiling deadline of August 2nd (although there are rumours the date will move out a bit thanks to better tax revenues), the greater the risk of an accident.

To be sure, Republicans claim the Treasury can just "prioritise" interest payments to avoid a default. Read the meticulous analysis that Jay Powell of the Bipartisan Policy Center did of the Treasury's cash flows in August for a sense of how risky that is. Among his findings:

For example, on Aug. 3, we project that the government will have about $12 billion in receipts and $32 billion in committed payments, including a $23 billion Social Security payment. And Aug. 15 presents a triple threat: a $19 billion daily deficit, a $29 billion interest payment and a quarterly refunding auction to pay off a maturing $27 billion bond.

Even assuming that Treasury manages to remain current on its debt, the firestorm that arises when vendors, pensioners and soldiers stop getting paid will be unprecedented. As the nonpartisan analysts at ISI Group note, the failure of TARP to pass on the first try in the fall of 2008 may not do justice. The main fallout then was the plunge in the stock market. This time, it will not be just financial market turmoil but “voter outrage associated with the prospect of an immediate 44% cut in federal spending that would instantaneously overwhelm the Capitol Hill switch board”. Both parties will be blamed, but Republicans more. After all, some, such as Michele Bachmann, have opposed raising the ceiling precisely to induce cuts on such a scale.

Mr Boehner talks tough. But he has less leverage than he lets on.