GOP Plays Weak Hand in Debt Debate

Plenty of people have already spilled ink on why Congress should raise the debt limit and why failing to do so would be a catastrophe. Nearly all of the arguments commonly advanced in favor of raising the debt ceiling are correct. Quite simply, Republicans should find other issues on which they can fight the administration. That said, if Republicans feel they simply must play a very dangerous game with the national debt, they ought to think of a better agenda.

A look at the current set of Republican debt limit vote negotiating points ought to disappoint any committed fiscal conservative.  Rather than asking for any particular additional spending cuts, entitlement reforms, or true exercises in fiscal restraint, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and his followers have simply asked for:

a wide range of major structural reforms that could be attached to the debt limit vote, including statutory spending caps, a balanced budget amendment and a two-thirds vote requirement for tax increases and debt limit increases.

Whether these things are good or bad ideas, they simply will not work. After all, 49 states have balanced budget provisions and there’s no correlation between their strictness and the quality of states’ finances. For example, fiscal basket cases California has super-strict constitutional provisions to limit taxes, restrict bond issues, and balance the budget each year while Virginia maintains good services, modest taxes, and an AAA bond rating despite having a weak-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness balanced budget requirement.  Even stricter caps on spending, such as Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, have also been obeyed only in the breach.

Some of the GOP’s ideas, indeed, seem almost like excuses: putting spending caps in statute, for example, is basically a way for Congress to say “we’ll make a law (which, by the way, we really don’t have to follow) that that says we’ll figure out how to cut spending later.” To say the least, this isn’t going to work.  A balanced budget amendment is a better idea but is also a pipe-dream (and a similarly empty promise) unless and until either party presents a credible plan to balance the budget.

In short, Republicans aren’t even asking for the right things: changes to procedures involved with the budget are not the same as spending cuts themselves and long experience in the states offers enormous proof of this. If the GOP insists on playing a dangerous game, in short, it ought to at least play for real stakes.

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