The Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday that it finished a round of egg farm inspections that were initiated following a salmonella outbreak in August that sickened more than 1,800 people, in the largest such outbreak since 1973. The FDA inspectors found that one farm (which the agency refused to identify) had a serious salmonella problem, while others had issues like failing to adequately control “rodent activity” and preventing “stray animals” from wandering into their facilities.

The FDA clearly did its job here, catching a potential problem before it actually turned into an outbreak of foodborne illness. However, if Republicans have their way, the FDA and other food inspectors at the Food Safety and Inspection Service are in for big budget cuts.

Under the House Republicans’ proposal to reduce non-defense discretionary spending, the FDA’s $2.3 billion budget (which makes up a whopping 0.07 percent of the overall federal budget) will be reduced by 20 percent, imperiling the jobs of 3,000 inspectors.

And that’s child’s play compared to the 40 percent hit the FDA would be in for under the House Republican Study Committee’s spending plan, or the 62 percent cut it would see under Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) budget. In a final kicker, Republicans are also threatening to defund the recently passed Food Safety Modernization Act, which boosts the inspection abilities of the FDA, even though it will actually save taxpayers money in the long run.

At the moment, one out of six Americans suffers from a foodborne illness every year, with 128,000 of those resulting in hospitalization. Ultimately, 3,000 people die from foodborne illness annually, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project has found that foodborne illness costs the U.S. $152 billion each year. With the growing amount of food that is coming into the U.S. from all over the world, the FDA and food safety inspection is becoming more, not less important.

The Republican argument — most vocally espoused by Paul — is that the market will simply self-regulate bad egg producers out of existence. Of course, that would only happen if egg buyers had perfect information (do you know where the eggs you buy on any given instance are from?), and even if perfect information existed, people would have to get sick and possibly die before the market worked its magic. The conservative vision of self-regulation entails needless pain and suffering that actual regulation can prevent.

Republicans have been extremely reluctant to lay out what, exactly, their proposed spending cuts would practically mean, but this is one area, among many others, where their proposed cuts would have real consequences in the everyday lives of Americans.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) yesterday filed the “Full Faith and Credit Act” as an amendment to legislation reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Toomey’s bill is an attempt to codify the order in which the federal government will pay its obligations in the event the debt ceiling is not raised before the country’s legal borrowing limit is reached. Such an event would require the government to move to a cash-only budget, paying out only what comes in each month in tax revenue.

Toomey’s bill instructs the Treasury to pay interest on the federal debt above all other obligations (which is what Treasury would likely do in the event the borrowing limit was reached anyway). As Toomey himself explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (titled “How To Freeze The Debt Ceiling Without Risking Default”), the bill will “require the Treasury to make interest payments on our debt its first priority in the event that the debt ceiling is not raised.”

Toomey seems to think that this might, in some way, help the U.S. avoid a default on its debt:

[I]n the past when we’ve reached the debt ceiling, and it’s happened several times, the Treasury secretary has made sure we don’t default on our obligations on Treasury securities. All I’m saying is let’s codify that because the catastrophic consequences to senior citizens, to savers, to small business owners, to people seeking mortgage, to our entire economy, would be endangered if we had a default on our debt.

But as Matt Yglesias pointed out, this bill simply codifies the way in which the U.S. would default; it doesn’t actually prevent a default from occurring. “This is nonetheless a kind of default. A person whose creditworthiness is above question meets all his financial obligations,” Yglesias wrote. Deputy Treasury Secretary Neil Wolin said much the same thing, calling Toomey’s idea “unworkable”:

It would not actually prevent default, since it would seek to protect only principal and interest payments, and not other legal obligations of the U.S., from non-payment. Adopting a policy that payments to investors should take precedence over other U.S. legal obligations would merely be default by another name, since the world would recognize it as a failure by the U.S. to stand behind its commitments.

Indeed, paying interest payments on the debt while failing to cover domestic mandatory payments like Social Security or veteran’s benefits is still a default, just in a way that concentrates the pain on Americans who had nothing to do with Congress’ inability to responsibly raise the debt ceiling. Much like the plan put forward by former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), which prioritized payments in the same way, Toomey’s bill seems to be more about political posturing that anything else.

In the end, Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling and pay of all of the obligations. To do otherwise would be supremely irresponsible and detrimental to the world economy.

Yesterday, for the first time since June 2008, the stock market closed above 12,000. According to the Associated Press, the stock increases that have occurred since March 2009 are the most rapid in more than eight decades, resulting in “one of the greatest bull markets in history”:

The remarkable run for stocks began on March 9, 2009. The Dow stood at 6,547, its lowest point in 12 years. Since then, in the fastest climb since the Great Depression, it has risen 84 percent thanks to surging corporate profits, the unexpected resilience of personal spending and a bond-buying intervention by the Federal Reserve that made stocks more appealing.

Once upon a time, conservatives of all stripes — from lawmakers in Congress to pundits across the media spectrum — loved to pin the blame for market woes on President Obama. Here’s some of the rhetoric they used:

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH): “The president certainly remains popular, but his policies are becoming less and less popular,” Boehner said, citing the continuing slide in the financial markets. “Certainly the stock market hasn’t acted very well.” [Politico, 3/4/09]

FORMER GOV. MITT ROMNEY: “During Barack Obama’s presidency, you’ve seen the stock market drop, what, ten percent? That’s a pretty clear indication that some people are very very concerned.” [TPM, 2/27/09]

REP. PETE SESSIONS: Obama intends to “diminish employment and diminish stock prices” as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy. [New York Times, 5/10/09]

SEAN HANNITY: “Obama, since he’s elected, has tanked the markets.” [Fox News, 3/10/09]

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: “Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama’s policies have become part of the economy’s problem.” [3/9/09]

LOU DOBBS: “[T]he stock market has lost 20 percent since this president was sworn in. He has his own bear market. That’s the definition of a bear market, a 20 percent decline. This is now the Obama bear market.” [CNN, 3/9/09]

JIM GERAGHTY: “Today the Dow is at 7,342, down 124 points on the day, and down 600 points in the month since Obama became president…Many factors affect stock prices on any given day, but to the extent that the market has responded to Obama’s election and taking office, it has been in one steady direction: down.” [National Review, 2/20/09]

JOE SCARBOROUGH: “Can you believe how much the markets have dropped since Barack Obama started announcing his economic policy?” [MSNBC, 3/3/09]

PAT BUCHANAN: “Two thousand points down on the Dow since Obama took office. That is a vote of no confidence.” [MSNBC, 3/3/09]

They even blamed Obama for falling markets before he was sworn into office!:

KARL ROVE: “How much of it is the market saying, ‘You know what? The economy is not in a good place and we’re looking at the future, and how much confidence should we have in the team that’s coming to make the economy better?’” [Fox News, 11/20/08]

DICK MORRIS: “Not just because he’s a radical, not just because he’s a Democrat, but because he’s going to raise the capital gains tax…It’s going to continue to tank. It’s lost 12 percent of its value in the last two days.” [Fox News, 11/07/08]

Using the stock market as an indicator of the popularity or effectiveness of economic policy is, for many reasons, quite silly. But the same conservatives who were very willing to cite falling markets in order to score political points have been silent on the market’s recent rebound.