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Two big data points in the headlines this week: 1) The average cost of a family health insurance plan will be $27,000 for coverage next year and 2) The federal debt grew faster than any time other than the pandemic and surpassed $38 trillion on Wednesday.

Both of these are objectively bad and both carry substantial political danger, but only one of them is likely to get much attention as the government shutdown sinks into its fourth week.

There are a lot of ways the current shutdown is different from its predecessors since the tactic came into common use 35 years ago.

We’ve never seen a president use a shutdown as a pretext for eliminating entire federal bureaus, nor a president so nakedly target the spending priorities of his congressional adversaries. Nor has a president ever simply declared that he would spend money on preferred uses without congressional approval. Neither have we even seen such enthusiastic violations of the federal law forbidding officials from using their offices for political messages.

Such is life in the Rosie O’Donnell shutdown.

But this “lapse in appropriations” is different in another fundamental way. This is the first-ever truly Democratic shutdown. Democrats have certainly threatened to withhold funding and even toyed with using a debt default as leverage, but it has been Republicans who drove every significant shutdown since 1990.

This is interesting from a tactical perspective — how mirroring drives parties into methods that had been declared anathema for decades. But there is a more practical consideration, too.

Congressional Republicans have had a variety of specific demands in the past 35 years, but all were variations on the same theme of reducing spending. The first big Democratic shutdown is about increasing spending.

The exception on the Republican side was President Trump’s self-shutdown of 2018 and 2019, in which he refused to sign a funding package that didn’t include additional funding for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. But that’s the outlier. The norm since former Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) developed the tool of the weaponized shutdown has been that Republicans refuse to accept a spending deal that they said increases the deficit too much.

The shutdown most similar to Senate Democrats’ current gambit, Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) 2013 ObamaCare shutdown, did aim at a substantially unrelated policy objective — the repeal of the then-new health insurance program — but the costs of the program were a central point of attack for Cruz and his allies.

Even when Trump shut the government down himself, he wasn’t asking for more money to be spent; he wanted lawmakers to cut other spending to cover the cost of his project. (After a bipartisan refusal, he went ahead and looted the money from the Pentagon budget, another precedent for his current violations of congressional spending authority.)

So we really are in new territory: stopping government spending to demand more government spending.

One of the disadvantages for Republicans in past shutdowns is that the national debt is like climate change: Voters say they care about it, but most are unwilling to sacrifice anything to address a problem that always seems just over the horizon. That’s the way we ended up with a debt that is eating our government out of house and home. Both parties concluded that fiscal irresponsibility is popular, so they’re both going to stay on the merry-go-round until it falls apart. As the feds approach $1 trillion a year in interest payments, that moment is getting closer all the time. But politicians being politicians, those worries are always put off until after the next election.

The crushing cost of health care, though, is no abstraction for either voters or the politicians who have to face them next year.

There are a lot of reasons health care costs are skyrocketing, and some are actually good news. As medical science comes up with more ways to help people live longer and better, costs will rise. The advent of weight-loss drugs, for instance, is proving very costly right now but may be offset later on by decreases in chronic illnesses like diabetes.

But a lot of........

© The Hill