Newt Gingrich was wrong. Last week, he said, “I am watching the
‘super committee’ in Washington with amazement. This is the dumbest
idea I’ve seen in a very long lifetime.” Mr. Speaker, please admit
it: the “super committee” isn’t the dumbest idea you’ve ever seen.
Maybe it’s in the top three, but there’s a lot of competition for
the title.
The supercommittee’s failure was supposed to cause panic
in the streets. The Defense Department — in the words of each of
the Joint Chiefs and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta — can’t stand
the effects of sequestration. On the other side, we’ve heard from
the OWS crowd — the voice of the White House — that any cuts in
entitlements or other domestic spending just can’t be
done.
But the failure to reach a deal hasn’t had a noticeable
effect on the markets. The news media are talking about it in mild
terms. They know the unspeakable secret: that whatever the result,
success or failure, cuts or sequestration, the supercommittee
results won’t take effect until 2013.
That’s right: the whole thing was set up to give the
appearance of spending cuts without the reality. And to give
Congress another whole year to mess around with the results. It was
a put-up job aimed to increase the debt ceiling without forcing
Congress to actually do anything that cuts federal
spending.
In short, it was a scam.
To those few who believe that Congress is doing a good job
— about 12.3 percent of us, according to the latest polls — let
me address a personal question: are you nuts?
There are two — and only two — effects that will felt
after the supercommittee’s final failure comes on Wednesday. They
are, first, that the whole debt ceiling mess could be hung around
Obama’s neck like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, second, that a
bad deal will fall apart.
And what a bad deal it was. In August, Republicans agreed
to raise the debt ceiling — for the eleventh time in about ten
years — in return for a Democratic promise to bargain in good
faith to reduce the deficit. It was a classic “if-then” deal, the
kind I
warned against in ancient days, about four months ago.
Republicans agreed to compromise on the debt ceiling — which had
an immediate effect — in return for a promise that the Democrats
would do something later. In this case, the something was actually
reducing government spending to substantially reduce the federal
debt over the next ten years.
And, as in the case of every “if-then” deal that has ever
been made, Republicans got snookered. The supercommittee was bound
to fail. It presumed that Democrats would bargain in good faith and
help reduce the deficit. But the Democrats had no intention of
doing so. They insisted, from the beginning, in tax increases to
outweigh any spending cuts.
When the deal was made, Obama had gotten what he wanted.
The debt ceiling was raised sufficently to enable him to continue
his Shermanesque march through our economy. He promptly commenced
trying to spend all that he could, proposing another “jobs bill,”
which was nothing more than another round of his failed stimulus
plan of 2009.
When the supercommittee sat down to work, Obama — as
usual — distanced himself from it. Rather than lead the
supercommittee to a workable result, he subcontracted his tax hike
agenda to the liberals in the group.
Obama didn’t want to get involved because that would
entail political risk. At a safe distance, any failure by the
supercommittee’s couldn’t be blamed on him.
Which sets the stage for more debt ceiling drama next
year. The Dems will staging political theatrics all year, seeking
more spending and every possible gimmick and evasion to avoid the
sequestration of entitlements. Medicare and Medicaid cuts won’t
happen, because Dems will do whatever is necessary — in bits and
pieces — to get around them. Whatever the Republicans do, they
have already been positioned to be defending the Bush-era tax cuts
and defense spending. It will be another round of the “guns vs.
butter” debate. On one side will be the Dems demanding to save the
children and the poor against the bad old Republicans defending the
Pentagon and the “tax cuts for the rich.” It will go ugly early.
Maybe as early as this week.
The second result will be that defense spending will be a
top-tier issue for 2012.
The massive defense cuts (theoretically) imposed by
sequestration will affect everything the Pentagon does next year.
Much of what the Pentagon needs to do will be done, but any ability
to plan for the future will remain in limbo while Congress debates
whether the sequestered spending will be restored, and to what
extent. Tens of billions of avoidable costs will be incurred while
Congress spends next year sorting things out.
The Army, Navy, and Air Force will not be able to sign
long term money-saving contracts for anything from healthcare to
new ships and aircraft. Contractors will have to wait through the
whole campaign year before they will know what the Pentagon can
do.
If Republican congressional candidates — and the
Republican nominee for president — play their cards
uncharacteristically right, they can defeat the Democrats
comprehensively. The question will be whether they can distinguish
among the defense spending we need, the defense spending we may
want, and the defense spending that the Democrats say we can
afford.
A preview of this argument is in a new study by MIT’s
Cindy Williams, released on 28 October. Entitled “The Future
Affordability of U.S. National Security,” Williams finds that
defense spending now comprises about 4.7 percent of our GDP, to
which she adds another 1.5 percent that is made up of Homeland
Security, veterans’ affairs, and intelligence.
Williams says that the affordability of defense spending
should be determined on the basis of five factors:
• Public perceptions of the security threat.
• The degree of debt-induced fiscal and economic risk
policy makers are willing to run.
• The level of taxation the public is willing to
bear.
• Whether and how much the costs of federal entitlement
programs, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, can be reined in;
and
• How much money is devoted to running the rest of the
federal government.
Notice, please, the complete absence of any mention of
what threats we expect our national defense establishment to defer
or defeat except as the public’s perception of it can be measured.
Notice also the preconceptions that pervade this theory.
Williams apparently believes that defense spending cannot
be supported without taxation to fund it, that funding defense is
an economic risk rather than a national security issue, and that if
entitlement programs cannot be reined in, defense must be
sacrificed. As nonsensical as what she writes is, it presages the
terms of the debate next year.
Williams comes to the conclusion that affordable defense
spending would be between 2.1 and 3.4 percent of GDP.
Defense-minded Republicans should study Williams’s paper
carefully. Not because she is right on what defense we can afford,
but because it poses the issues they should make their top priority
next year.
First, what is the public’s perception of the threats we
face? The public has been lulled by the constant tides of war since
9/11. Few Americans look beyond Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq and
the planned withdrawal from Afghanistan to believe there is a
continuing threat from Islamic terrorism. All the Republican
candidates’ protestations that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable
fall on deaf ears because we’ve heard it all, from Bush and Obama,
so often that those protestations are meaningless.
The public is apparently unconcerned with the
vulnerabilities we face. Last week’s cyber attack against a water
pumping station in Illinois is a very big deal. Has anyone thought
about what we’d suffer if some of our military and intelligence
satellites were disabled or even turned against us in a similar
attack?
Republicans need to think about what the public needs to
know in order to understand what the threats really are. They have
to step up and lead the public to an understanding that defense
spending is not a question of what we can afford. It’s a question
of what we need to spend — based on a thorough analysis of the
threats — to deter or defeat them.
Defense spending can, perhaps, be cut. But not before we
determine what is fat and what is muscle.
