As expected, the new Tea Party Republicans are going after federal spending with a meat cleaver, demanding $61 billion in budget cuts during the current fiscal year, which ends September 30th, and refusing to pass any budget for more than two weeks that doesn’t meet their demands. Mary and I were hours away from getting thrown out of Organ Pipe National Monument, where we’re currently camped and driving up the national debt with our six-dollar a night Senior Pass camping fee, which doesn’t even cover the cost of a howling coyote. Luckily, the two-week budget extension passed, which will cover our time here. After that, we might be reduced to parking in Wal-Mart parking lots again.
But good for the Tea Partiers. It’s what they promised and it’s what they should try to deliver to the voters who elected them. Voters are rightly concerned about the deficit and the reach and role of the federal government, so this is the debate we should have. But before we start talking about how to reduce the deficit and national debt, we should take a look at what did and did not get us into this mess to begin with:
First of all, virtually all of the programs targeted by the Tea Partiers have nothing to do with the current deficit. Public broadcasting did not cause the deficit. If it did, the fifty dollars a year I send to public television would leave me bankrupt. Proportionally, it’s a lot more than what the Feds spend.
Foreign aid did not cause the deficit. We spend less than one percent of the budget on foreign aid, and we rank 22nd in foreign aid as a percentage of GDP. This makes us about the cheapest country in the world when it comes to dropping a dime in a beggar’s cup. Maybe a nickel, but really, get a job.
Aid to the poor for heating assistance did not cause the deficit. I allow my power company to round up my monthly bill to the next dollar in a program to provide assistance to those at risk of freezing in the dark, and those few cents are a much bigger part of my total budget than the federal program is of its total budget. Still, I totally don’t feel it at the end of the month.
The list goes on. Tea Party cuts address only twenty-five percent of the national budget—discretionary spending outside of the military—and focus their wrath on a few programs they’ve always hated, like research on climate change, the EPA, and virtually every program of assistance for the poor.
Curiously, they would also reduce border security, which will not be a big hit here in Arizona. I really don’t get that one except that it shows they truly mean business. But then, so do the Mexican cartels.
Their targeted cuts would do the most harm to the most vulnerable and, equally importantly, they would do little or nothing to reduce national debt in the long run.
It seems obvious that if we’re going to look at reducing the deficit, we need to look first at what caused it. There are three things:
First, a massive tax cut under President Bush that concentrated its largess in the upper and extreme-upper income levels: Not that we in the middle class didn’t get a nice piece of pie out of the deal, but really, nothing that in any way changed our quality of life. More like an unexpected Christmas present, appreciated but soon forgotten. A toaster, maybe, or new pajamas.
Any long-term economic benefit from these cuts failed to materialize. There was, for example, no measurable uptick in employment. Not even billionaires like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet wanted the money. “Really, we have enough already,” they said, but Congress and President Bush made them take more anyway. These silly rich people don’t even understand capitalism.
Second, the war in Afghanistan: Almost all Americans including me supported the president in the invasion of Afghanistan to annihilate Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, once we had heard of the Taliban and what a bunch of medieval creeps they are. Ten years later, we’re still in the fight. These fighters are tougher than we thought. We should have asked the Russians.
And third,
The war in Iraq: A majority of Americans, not including me, supported the invasion, but then a majority also believed it was approved by the United Nations. Not to mention the whole WMD thing, but let’s not get bogged down in all that.
The really amazing thing about the Bush budget was that all of the expenditures for our two wars were off the books. They never showed as part of the annual budget. It would be like Mary and me saying all of our spending on horses, motorcycles was not included in our household budget. Things would feel pretty, pretty good until we got a note from the bank that we were overdrawn and now had a fifty dollar fine in addition to our empty savings account which used to have $127 dollars in it. This could cause us to seriously look at our spending on Brussels sprouts.
Maybe Obama’s recovery spending added to the deficit and maybe it didn’t. It saved a ton of jobs and almost certainly kept us out of a genuine depression. Lots of economists think he should have spent more, but I’m no economist, and neither are any of the Tea Partiers. At any rate, that spending is quickly phasing out and we’re even being paid back a lot of it from the banks and GM.
So if the tea party boys and girls want to seriously chop away at the deficit, they should go after the programs that caused it in the first place and that could make a significant difference in reducing it: bring the troops home from the longest wars in American history and end the Bush-era tax cuts, or at least reduce them at the highest income levels (exactly what Obama and congressional Democrats proposed for the current budget, but it was promptly shot down by the Republicans.)
In the meantime, I have to give Mary the bad news about the Brussels sprouts.
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