A government shutdown looming, the budget talks between
congressional Republicans and Democrats on both ends of
Pennsylvania Avenue appear to have stalled.
Reports are circulating that Republican leaders are poised to
reject the White House’s latest budget offer. Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid is already pointing the finger of blame.
“The infighting between the Tea Party and the rest of the
Republican party, including the Republican leadership in Congress,
is keeping our negotiating partner [from] the negotiating table,”
Reid told
reporters Monday. “It’s pretty hard to negotiate without someone on
the other side of the table to talk to.” A deal must be reached by
April 8 to keep some parts of the government from temporarily
shutting down.
Reid later issued a statement recounting “weeks of productive
negotiations with Speaker Boehner” and demanding, “For the sake of
our economy, it’s time for mainstream Republicans to stand up to
the Tea Party and rejoin Democrats at the table to negotiate a
responsible solution that cuts spending while protecting jobs.”
The political calculus behind all this is clear: Republicans won
the midterm elections because enthusiastic conservatives, rallied
by the Tea Party, joined with wary independents in rejecting
Democratic candidates. Splitting this coalition by forcing
Republicans to disappoint either Tea Party conservatives or
moderate swing voters is a prerequisite for any Democratic recovery
next year.
But there is another conflict at work here: the tension between
the budgetary math and the political math. The former clearly
suggests drastic action on federal spending is needed. The national
debt has zoomed past $14 trillion and Washington borrows nearly 40
cents of every dollar it spends. The cost of servicing that debt is
rising, and the picture looks bleaker when the total unfunded
liabilities of the major entitlement programs are factored in.
Left unreformed, Social Security and Medicare will soak up the
entire budget — crowding out such necessities as national defense
— and ultimately subsume the country’s whole GDP. The tipping
point for that crisis remains far off from the perspective of
politicians’ and voters’ short time horizons, but reform sooner
will avoid painful benefit cuts to retirees already dependent on
those programs later.
Praising his party as “honest with ourselves and the country,”
Reid declared, “We readily recognize that in the end, we won’t get
everything that we want.” But we are in this fiscal mess precisely
because the political class has been getting everything it wants.
As the Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl reported last year,
discretionary spending has grown 79 percent faster than inflation
since 2000. Over that period, anti-poverty programs increased 89
percent faster than inflation, education 219 percent, veterans
spending 107 percent, and Medicare 81 percent.
Also over that time period, the federal government has created
two new health care entitlements (both unfunded), launched three
wars (all unfunded), bailed out multiple industries, passed a
massive stimulus bill, enacted bloated farm, energy, and
transportation bills, and approved over 9,000 earmarks just last
year alone. “Simply put,” writes Reidl, “all parts of government
are growing.”
The president likes to talk about “false choices,” but his
colleagues on Capitol Hill have avoided making any hard choices. It
took until 1987 to approve the first $1 trillion federal budget. It
would now take substantial and almost unprecedented spending
reductions to run just a $1 trillion annual deficit.
In that sense, it is the Tea Party that has been most honest
with themselves and the country. Fresh from introducing a plan to
cut $500 billion from the federal budget in a single year, Sen.
Rand Paul (R-KY) has offered a five-year balanced budget proposal.
It’s not certain all the specific numbers will add up once scored
by entities like the Congressional Budget Office — though
sometimes that’s the fault of the scorers, who assume that
repealing Obamacare will cost more money than it saves, for example
— but it is bolder than anything seen from the leadership of
either party.
Here is where the political math intrudes: nothing can pass
without significant Democratic buy-in, in addition to the votes of
wobbly Republicans. Democrats appear to be balking at $61 billion
in spending cuts over the next six months. How many of them would
vote for stronger stuff?
Then there is the
question of whether the next six months is really the most
important timeframe. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan
(R-WI) is getting ready to release the fiscal 2012 budget, which
will deal with entitlements as a part of a longer-term, 10-year
spending plan. It remains to be seen whether even his budget will
pass Tea Party muster. “Paul Ryan is the moderate on the House
Budget Committee now,” Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) jokes. But Ryan
has been thinking longer and harder about the debt crisis than just
about anyone in the leadership.
Arguments can be made for both a more and less aggressive
Republican approach to the current budget standoff. Some point out
that the Republicans were ultimately, if unfairly, blamed for the
Clinton-era government shutdown and lost their momentum on spending
afterward. Others would counter that the Republicans recovered from
the shutdown sufficiently to not just maintain control of Congress
but actually negotiate a balanced budget. GOP fiscal discipline
didn’t really collapse until 1998, which might tell in favor of
striking while the iron is hot.
It is by no means clear that even this Congress is ready to
grapple with a fiscal catastrophe precipitated by the failure to
make hard choices and set meaningful budget priorities. The coming
weeks will show how determined Washington remains to delay the
inevitable.
