If hysteria and hyperbole could balance the budget, we would be
running record surpluses right now. In that parallel universe, the
Democratic reaction to Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget proposal
would wash away the red ink much faster than Ryan himself.
Consider this brainstorm by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz
(D-Fla.), the new head of the Democratic National Committee: “This
Republican path to poverty passes like a tornado through seniors’
nursing homes.” Schultz isn’t the only siren screeching out a
warning to take refuge in the storm cellar. Rep. Jan Schakowsky
(D-Ill.) is conducting an air raid drill.
“Make no mistake about it, the Ryan budget is a war on seniors,”
she said in a press conference organized by the Congressional Task
Force on Seniors. “Newt Gingrich has said Medicare should wither on
the vine. Well, this Republican budget would chop it down.” The new
civility didn’t stop there: “Republicans are literally trying to
kill Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Democrats will stand
of the way of their war on seniors.”
The ever-excitable Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) was not to be
outdone: “They use Medicaid as a piggy bank in order to avoid
asking the people at the very top of our economic ladder, the very
richest in our society, the highest income earners of millions and
dollars or more, to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.”
Finally, there was the president himself. “It’s a vision that
says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance
in order for us to reduce the deficit,” Obama intoned during his
April 13 speech asking for a post-Ryan do-over on his 2012 budget.
Obama continued:
Who are these 50 million Americans? Many are somebody’s
grandparents, maybe one of yours, who wouldn’t be able afford
nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some
are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s
syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities… so severe that they
require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to
fend for themselves.
William Kristol
rightly compared Obama’s remarks to Ted Kennedy’s infamous
“Robert Bork’s America” speech. In 1987, Kennedy accused Bork of
wanting to force blacks to eat at segregated lunch counters while
censoring artists, banning the teaching of evolution, and
subjecting every American to the midnight knock at the door. Maybe
Kennedy just had better speechwriters than contemporary
Democrats.
But that’s not the only time we’ve been down this apocalyptic
road. Before a Republican Congress passed and President Clinton
signed welfare reform, Democratic politicians and liberal activists
casually tossed around dire predictions of a million additional
children being consigned to poverty. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Was.)
said the bill would “put 1.5 million to 2.5 million children into
poverty” within two years of becoming law.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) warned that welfare reform would
leave “children hungry and homeless… begging for money, begging
for food, and even at eight and nine years old engaging in
prostitution.” Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) called it an
“abomination” and imagined it could lead to children being sold
into slavery. Marian Wright Edelman
wrote contemptuously of the need to reduce spending: “It is
nonsense for congressional leaders to argue that they are
protecting children from a future debt children did not create by
destroying the vital laws and investments children need to live,
learn, and grow today.”
Replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children — welfare as we
knew it — with a block grant to the states and Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan (D-N.Y.) said we could expect children to seek warmth by
sleeping on sewer grates: “We will say, ‘Why are these children
sleeping on grates? Why are they being picked up in the morning
frozen? Why are they scrambling? Why are they horrible to each
other, a menace to all, most importantly to themselves?’” Moynihan,
who should have known better, worried that even his fellow
Democrats were “literally arranging flowers on the coffin of the
provision for children in the Social Security Act.”
Needless to say, none of this actually happened. Welfare reform
was not without its flaws, but after it was enacted caseloads were
reduced by 57 percent in ten years and child poverty dropped by 1
percent per year for the first five years. Child poverty rates
remain below their pre-1996 levels despite a severe economic
downturn and lackluster post-recession job growth.
Just because the most apoplectic liberals were as wrong about
welfare reform as they were about the Reagan tax cuts spurring
hyperinflation — when it fact they helped whip stagflation — does
not necessarily mean that they are wrong about Paul Ryan’s Medicare
and Medicaid reforms. But it does give us reason to distrust those
who are so confident in government while having so little
confidence in ordinary people. The budget cannot be balanced by
their fear-mongering and moral outrage.
