Political leaders and movement activists need bifocal vision. It
is necessary to be able to look up along the path while also
looking down at one’s feet as they take small steps toward the
goal, so that one doesn’t trip and fall short of the horizon. We
recognize this as common sense, and it shows up in aphorisms: “A
journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” “leg over
leg the dog got to Dover,” and “taking the entire salami a slice at
a time.”
Yet on March 15, claiming that the measure wouldn’t cut spending
fast enough, 54 House Republicans voted against a three-week
continuing resolution that reduced the 2011 budget by $6
billion. Because those reductions came out of the budget baseline,
the bill would have meant a $60 billion cut over the next decade.
Those 54 Republicans were joined by Heritage Action and the Club
for Growth, which announced they would rate a vote to cut the
budget by $6 billion as a bad vote on the report cards they send
out to members.
In the past 10 years, budgets in Washington grew under Bush from
$1.863 trillion in 2001 to $2.983 trillion in 2008, and then went
into warp speed under Obama, climbing to $3.518 trillion in 2009
and $3.456 trillion in 2010. Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget is
projected to be $3.8 trillion, almost a full trillion more than
Bush’s last budget. How could a small cut in the 2011 budget be
seen as the wrong thing to do?
When the Republicans won a net gain of 63 members of the House,
giving them a solid majority of 242-24 more than the constitutional
majority of 218-they had for the first time in history a Reagan
Republican majority. The 1995 Gingrich-led majority of 230 was a
partisan majority, but not a conservative one. Today’s majority was
elected with the energy and enthusiasm of the Tea Party ringing in
their ears, the sense that “they” had been given a second chance
after the dual failures to limit spending during the GOP majority
of 1995-2006 and the entire Bush presidency, and a belief that the
country, and perhaps history, was with them and not Obama. The 2010
election was about a grand goal of returning to smaller,
constitutionally limited government. But Obama was still the
president. He held the veto pen. He was as dedicated to increasing
government spending as the Tea Party was to reducing the same. And
Harry Reid had 53 Democratic votes in the Senate.
Republicans had a clear goal: to shrink government. They had the
vision thing down pat. They did not have power, though. Speaker
John Boehner had a two-track strategy. Pass bills that showed
America where the Republicans wanted to go in the
House-understanding that Harry Reid would not allow a similar vote
in the Senate and that Obama would certainly veto such legislation
if it did pass both houses. The House voted 245 to 189 on January
19 to repeal Obamacare in its entirety. Every Republican voted for
repeal, along with three Democrats. And because the Democrats had
never actually passed a 2011 budget, House Republicans voted for a
continuing resolution that would cut $61 billion from the 2011
budget already under way to bring it down to the 2008 level for
domestic discretionary spending. This had been promised in the
“Pledge to America.”
The Senate rejected the $61 billion in reductions for the 2011
budget, and Boehner offered to keep the government open for two
weeks if the Senate and president would agree to cut $4 billion
from current funding levels. Two weeks later he offered to keep the
government open for three weeks if the Senate and president would
agree to an additional $6 billion in cuts the House passed. The
goal was to continue to creep forward slowly with cuts every two or
three weeks that kept the Congress on schedule to cut $61 billion
over the rest of the fiscal year, ending in September.
Radio talk-show hosts, activist groups, and eventually dozens of
Republican congressmen rebelled at this “weak beer” strategy, and
demanded that Boehner force a showdown and demand all $61 billion
at once. After Boehner sat down with President Obama and Harry
Reid, he reached a final deal that included a $38.5 billion
reduction from the 2011 budget. On April 14, 59 Republicans in the
House actually voted against this budget cut, objecting that it
wasn’t enough. After all, Obama’s budget for 2011 was $3.8
trillion. The national debt had ballooned to $14 trillion. We were
cutting only 1 percent of the year’s total spending, and less than
a tenth of a percent of the debt. Weren’t we supposed to be
rolling back Obama’s trillions of spending? And here we were stuck
cutting back last year’s spending levels by only tens of billions.
Even looking at the effect of the budget cuts over the course of a
decade, the deal only pared back $315 billion-a number dwarfed by
the size of the spending problem.
The Republican leadership and its allies argued, patiently, and
sometimes not so patiently, that one ought not “make the perfect
the enemy of the good.” In other words, compromise means going in
the right direction (less spending) more slowly than you want. It’s
an improvement over losing (more spending). If one is traveling
from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, arriving in West Virginia is
not treason…it is on the way to L.A. (Now should your feet get
wet and you start hearing people speaking French, you have moved
backward, not forward. That is losing.)
The leadership’s explanations only irritated Tea Party activists
around the nation, and gave radio talk-show hosts and potential
Republican presidential candidates a cost-free opportunity to
burnish their Tea Party street cred by belittling the slow progress
against spending as unworthy of the November 2010 Republican
victory. A disappointed base is an unhappy base and risks becoming
a “stay at home” base during the elections.
SO HOW IS IT that everything changed in two weeks? The
Boehner-Obama 2011 budget cut deal was agreed upon Friday, April 8.
It limped through the House on April 14-and it turned out to be a
sideshow. That’s because on April 5, House Budget Committee
chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin unveiled his 2012 budget, which
included budget projections for the next decade and beyond. Ryan’s
budget reduced Obama’s planned spending over the next 10 years by
$6 trillion. It wiped out Obamacare and its spending and taxes.
Unlike Obama’s budget, which included $1.5 trillion in higher taxes
by ending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for higher earners and
imposing a number of taxes through the health care bill, the Ryan
plan outlined a tax reform bringing the top marginal tax rate for
individuals and companies to 25 percent from today’s 35 percent and
Obama’s threatened 39.5 percent. All of a sudden Republican
congressmen were looking not at their feet but at the stars. This
was the long-range “vision thing.” Not battling over billions, but
tackling trillions.
The Ryan budget would take federal spending from today’s 25
percent of the economy to 20 percent of the economy within 10
years. By 2050 federal spending would be down to 15 percent. By
contrast, if nothing were done, the budget would be on autopilot to
take up half of the economy by 2050.
Yet Paul Ryan’s budget is not
merely a Tea Party fantasy that cannot withstand the slings and
arrows of the establishment press and the Chicago gang running the
2012 Obama reelection race.
Ryan’s model is the successful 1996 welfare reform legislation
that liberals have claimed as their own success. Heck, it was Bill
Clinton’s idea-after he vetoed it twice. Ryan’s plan block grants
the $273 billion Medicaid program, the food stamp program, and 77
other means-tested welfare programs, meaning that the funds for the
programs would be sent back to the states. The federal block grant
would grow at the rate of inflation and population, and no more.
Governors would have the freedom to run those programs as they
wished. This, along with other mandatory reforms, would save
taxpayers $2.5 trillion over the next decade.
The Ryan budget would also protect and reform Medicare. Everyone
over 55 would see no change in their Medicare. (Smart politics.)
For those under 55, they would, beginning in 2022, be given a
premium supplement allowing them to buy their own health care
insurance. The grant would be the same amount that would have been
spent on them that year and would increase with inflation. The idea
is that giving citizens more control over their health care
decisions and having spending increase with inflation, but not
more, will yield significant savings over time. The budget would
also realize other savings from abolishing Obamacare and reducing
domestic discretionary spending to 2006 levels and freezing it
there for five years. Military spending would be nicked, coming
down $87 billion over 10 years.
The Ryan Path to Prosperity is the most radical and ambitious
conservative agenda since…ever. There’s been no previous effort
of similar size or scope. And yet it received the votes of all but
four Republicans in the House. (Two of them, Ron Paul and Walter
Jones, thought the measure insufficiently hard-core.) House
Republicans believe it politically defensible. Obama’s reaction was
to pretend to move in its direction but replace the included
spending cuts with higher taxes by reducing “spending through the
tax code”-in other words, higher taxes. Even Jon Stewart mocked
this new euphemism for tax hikes. With the passage of Ryan’s 2012
budget, the whining about the difference between $61 billion and
$38.5 billion in the 2011 budget suddenly shifted to a conversation
about how Republicans plan to cut $6 trillion in Obama spending and
stop $1.5 trillion in Obama taxes over the next 10 years.
Soon we’ll see the drafting of implementing legislation for the
Ryan Path to Prosperity. But those appropriation bills will run up
against the Senate and the White House veto. House Republican
leaders will have to remember that they must have bifocal
vision-seeing and articulating the end goal as well as the way
through today’s weeds-and communicate this to both the backbenchers
in Congress and their nervous supporters across the country.
