Congress Passes the Buck on Budget Cuts
The fudged numbers used to calculate the Senate's $41 billion cuts and the $61 billion in House cuts make it clear: Congress is content to just talk about the debt.
The House passed a version of the Fiscal Year 2011 Continuing Resolution (CR) for Appropriations last week. The House GOP leadership allowed an open and free debate, realizing that such a week-long discussion would make newer members feel part of the team.
In addition, the open rule allowed a critical “venting” for left and right. Speaker John Boehner deserves great credit for requesting an open rule and then allowing the debate to run its course. He may well find future rewards from his newest colleagues since he treated them as equals and gave them equal opportunity.
Now the Senate must confront the CR debate and the reality of the House’s work.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced that the Senate will produce a bill that saves $41 billion. The House-passed CR yielded $61 billion in cuts. Optimists see those two sets of numbers and immediately say, “Split the difference, get a year-long CR and let’s start the debt ceiling fight.”
The more cynical among observers react the way that Glenn Kessler did in his Washington Post blog Thursday morning. They look closely at the $41 billion in Senate cuts and notice some interesting gimmicks. They also look closely at the House’s claimed $61 billion and notice similar gimmicks.
Two questions emerge from this legerdemain: will Tea Party House Republicans notice the gimmicks and will they hold their noses and vote for a compromise CR conference report that yields, voila, $51 billion in savings? I suspect they will and demand more “real cuts” as part of the debt ceiling increase debate.
Both House and Senate leaders had little choice but to fudge the numbers. With five months of FY11 already behind us, finding real cuts from current policy spending that would yield $50 billion, let alone the $100 billion originally promised to the GOP right, proved arithmetically impossible, as we have written often before.
It became even more unlikely when both chambers chose to put “security-related” appropriations bills off limits to cuts. In short, about 12-13 per cent of the federal budget bears 100 per cent of the proposed deficit reduction.
As a political cost-benefit analysis, one over-riding question pops up: why are Members cutting so deeply into programs like cancer research, education and training and infrastructure -- programs most Americans think critical to future economic growth -- in order to gain a trivial amount of debt reduction. Maximum pain for minimal gain strikes me about as wise as buying stocks high and selling them low. One doesn’t last long with either strategy.
To meander a bit, has anyone else noted the irony that courageous citizens in North Africa are dying in the streets in order to achieve democracy, while the democracy that the United States enjoys yields a Congress that cannot conjure up the courage to truly cut the entitlement structure that yields crushing future debt.
Of course, many in the nation’s capital argue that the debt disaster will happen in five to ten years and by then someone else will hold office and it will be their problem—minimal Congressional pain today, no national gain tomorrow.
North Africans dodge bullets; Congress dodges responsibility.
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