Avlon: How Shutdown Hurts Ryan's Budget
John Avlon writes at The Daily Beast:
Rep. Paul Ryan has put forward a gutsy budget proposal that deals with entitlement reform and promises to cut the deficit and debt by more than $6 trillion in the next decade. Fiscal conservatives should be cheering.
But instead, some on the far right seem determined to bring about a government shutdown by the end of the week over a comparatively small sum. This all-or-nothing absolutism will provoke a popular backlash and overshadow the Ryan budget, stunting its potential as a constructive conversation starter about long-term fiscal responsibility.
At issue is whether conservatives will accept a compromise $30 billion spending cut in the 2011 budget or insist on $60 billion in short-term cuts, along with policy provisions defunding Planned Parenthood, the Environmental Protection Agency, and National Public Radio that are popular with social conservatives but political kryptonite to independents and centrists.
But the compromise measure of $30 billion is the largest onetime dollar-for-dollar cut to a proposed budget in American history—a good day at the office for anyone who wants to cut government spending. The alternative is a government shutdown that will solidify Main Street voters’ frustration with Washington’s culture of dysfunction.
The other elephant in the room is that short-term cuts to domestic discretionary spending, though painful, do little to reduce the long-term deficit and debt, which now clocks in at $14 trillion.
That’s because domestic discretionary spending is roughly 12 percent of the total budget—the rest is defense, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Any serious long-term plan can’t realistically rely on short-term cutting alone. And in the wake of the Simpson-Bowles Deficit Reduction Commission, the Ryan budget plan is the most serious proposal that’s been put on the table so far in Washington.
The Tea Party should be applauding, but instead its members seem determined to take the U.S. government off a cliff with a seriously misplaced sense of political courage. ...
