IT'S OFFICIAL: The Disastrous Obamacare Launch Saved The Economy

APIn early October, Patrick Lamanske of Champaign, Ill., works with Amanda Ziemnisky, right, of the Champaign Urbana Public Health District office in Champaign to try to sign his wife, Ping Lamanske, left, up for health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act.

There's big news in Washington DC today: Democratic and Republican leaders have agreed on a budget to avert a government shutdown come next year.

Not only have they agreed on a budget, the deal actually undoes nearly half of the sequestration spending cuts.

That means there will be less shutdown-related uncertainty and less austerity than we otherwise might have expected.

And for that we can thank (in part) the disastrous Obamacare launch. Because Obamacare has rolled out terribly, Obama's approval ratings are in the toilet. This is a very welcome turn of events for the Republican party, which just over a month ago was in the toilet itself approval-wise. Republicans now have a good hand to play going into next November, and the only way they could obviously screw it up is by doing something stupid like shutting down the government again.

So it appears that Republicans are content now to just not rock the boat and get to the next election which they hope will be a big one for them thanks to Obamacare.

That's great news for the US economy.

As we wrote yesterday, 2014 could finally be the year for the US economy. The economic data is starting to gather steam, and there's no major event risk to torpedo that. Whatever tail risk there was related to the budget now appears to be gone.