Readers of TAS’s website may be familiar with my growing
obsession with America’s looming disaster due to over-spending,
debt and, most importantly, endless entitlement spending
currently on auto-pilot, a kind of ravenous beast consuming most
of our seed corn now and into the future.
I have previously described the entitlement crisis as a
kind of “Death Star” hovering over this and future generations of
our countrymen and women, including my eleven
grandchildren.
Sarah Palin is not my choice for president, but her recent
description of our hemorrhaging fiscal situation as “generational
theft” pushed all my buttons. You go, girl!
As it turns out, I had a chance encounter in an elevator
with my former boss, John Ashcroft, former Attorney General of
the United States, U.S. Senator, Governor and Attorney General
for Missouri. In fact, I owe my current career in environmental
and natural resources work to him. He appointed me to his cabinet
as director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the
state EPA (with parks, energy and soil conservation thrown in for
good measure), in his second term as governor. I had more fun in
that job than any human being has a right to have — even with
the headache of finally resolving the Times Beach Superfund
settlement.
John (as he always prefers to be called) invited me up to
his office to chat about an upcoming Lincoln Day celebration back
in Missouri at which he was going to make a tribute to retiring
U.S. Senator Kit Bond. He was looking well and displayed his
customary ease in conversation which I have experienced even when
he was in public office and up to his ears in alligators. In
time, the conversation turned to the debt and whether or not the
Republicans will be up to the challenge of reining in federal
spending.
I shared with him my concerns about the Republicans’ sorry
record on spending, earmarks, entitlement reform, and their own
failure to even consider President George W. Bush’s reforms for
Social Security.
John Ashcroft considered the matter and first responded
with the observation that certainty was not given to us in this
world much less in the political sphere. You have to consider the
probabilities over time. In terms of the current Democratic
dispensation, the prospects were pretty slim that they were going
to do anything substantive about spending, entitlements or the
debt.
The Republicans, however, despite their past lapses, have
the political incentive to tackle spending, even entitlement
reform, at least at the outset. He cited the 1990s, admittedly
good economic times, when Republicans supported balanced budgets
and reformed welfare.
But, again, nothing is certain. John Ashcroft believes that
all wings of the party — social as well as economic and national
security — have to rally around the spending issue, first and
foremost. He believes this for both policy and political reasons.
Clearly, the debt cannot continue to grow, indefinitely, without
wrecking the country. But, politically, for the Republican Party
as a center-right party, John believes that “the coefficient of
unity is the highest on spending.” In other words, the spending
situation, now in extremis, draws in all elements of the
Republican base as well as the restless independent voters who
see the current trend as an existential threat to all that makes
this country unique and exceptional.
John went on to tie in these fiscal concerns with families
and the future of our children. “Stealing from your kids is as
ugly a picture as you can imagine,” said the former Attorney
General. He even went so far as to liken it to a kind of
prospective “child abuse” for generations to come, depriving them
of their birthright, as Americans, in terms of economic
opportunity, the ability to raise, clothe and shelter a family,
and pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as they see
it.
While we did not discuss the consequences for national
security of debt and escalating entitlement spending, they are
self-evident as evidenced by the steadily declining military
budgets and commitments of the Western European welfare states
over the past 40 or 50 years.
I mentioned the recent proposal by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI)
to reform, simultaneously, both entitlements and the tax code,
which even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says would
balance the budget without raising taxes. I told John that I
would vote for it in a heart beat, but I would not want to
predict what the majority of sitting Republican congressmen and
women would do since it takes away benefits as well as reduces
tax rates. John indicated that he hears very good things about
Paul Ryan but was not familiar with his proposal.
I came away from my conversation with John Ashcroft more
hopeful than I have been in a long time. His view of both the
economic necessity and the political benefits of focusing on
spending made sense. It is a necessary starting point in a
political realignment that, eventually, must go beyond reducing
discretionary spending and actually restructure, reduce, or
means-test the big three entitlements of Medicaid, Medicare, and
Social Security.
We are dealing with probabilities, compounded by the
vagaries of human nature. Yet, hope is a theological rather than
a rational or natural virtue. Indeed, it is hope that brought
most of our ancestors to these shores in the first place. So we
cannot give up on the land of the free and the home of the
brave.
