With Washington DC's attention focused on the antics of Ted Cruz and the tea partiers, who are threatening to shut down the government unless Obamacare is defunded, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture: Aside from Obamacare, the budget battles of the past three years have been exclusively about the Republican obsession with cutting spending while we're trying to recover from the worst recession since World War II.

This is lunacy, and it's the subject of "Death by a Thousand Cuts," my cover story in the current issue of Mother Jones. The piece is framed around the famous Excel error in the paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, but my point isn't really to blame them for what happened. Their paper, predicting doom if U.S. debt levels went above 90 percent of GDP, provided important intellectual cover to the austerity zealots who wanted to use the recession as an excuse to hack away at spending on social welfare programs, but the truth is that the zealots would have done it anyway. R&R just made their job easier.

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