Promises to Keep

Is it Friday yet?  It’s not?  Really?  Sigh.

I checked the opinion polls today.  Apparently my previous post had absolutely no impact on Democratic voter enthusiasm.  In fact, if Gallup’s latest voter tracking polls are to be believed, I may have consigned the Party to an 87-seat loss in the House of Representatives.  Now I know things aren’t great out there, but 87 seats?  Come on.

But that was last week.  This is a whole new seven-day period.  As such, I would like to mention something that failed to get the attention it deserved during my fruitless search for rainbow-crapping unicorns.  About two weeks ago, Republicans released something they called a “Pledge to America.”  Standing in front of a palate of pressure-treated lumber at a hardware store just outside of D.C., House Minority Leader John Boehner declared this pledge to be a blueprint for Republican fiscal responsibility should they take over Congress in November.  I would like to take this opportunity to call shenanigans on John Boehner.  What he calls a “blueprint to restore America,” I might call, quite generously, intellectually dishonest.

In short, the Republican “plan” aims to reduce the deficit by repealing any unused TARP funds, trimming 100 billion dollars of discretionary spending, de-funding healthcare reform, and, or course, cutting taxes.  The idea is that “…with common sense exceptions for seniors, veterans and defense…” these steps will set the United States back on sound fiscal footing and reverse the march toward socialism we’ve apparently been on since January of 2009.  If you are partial to that worldview I suppose all that sounds pretty good.  But even a cursory evaluation of the details reveals the absolute fiscal fraud the self-proclaimed party of fiscal responsibility has become.

First, as we discovered late last week, funds expended under the TARP program have been almost completely repaid.  The amount currently outstanding totals approximately $50 billion, and by the time the Republicans retake the House, the taxpayers may even have turned a profit on their investment.  There isn’t going to be any unused TARP money to repeal.  Strike one.

Second, I know it sounds like a lot of money, but $100 billion worth of discretionary spending amounts to virtually nothing in a 3.5 trillion dollar budget.  It is, in fact, less than 3% of the annual budget.  No Republican seriously believes that cutting 3% from the budget will set America’s fiscal house in order.  But the reason they can get away with it is because so few people actually understand where their tax dollars actually go.  There is a common misconception that if we simply trim a little from the welfare budget and reduce the amount we spend on foreign aid; we wouldn’t need to borrow money from anybody.  Sadly, like so many other things about politics, it isn’t that simple.  Below is a pie chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, quantifying what tax dollars actually pay for.

Taken together, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and Defense/Security (including veterans benefits) total nearly 70% of Federal spending.  If Boehner’s statement regarding “common sense exceptions for seniors, defense and veterans” implies that the programs making up more than two-thirds of the budget are off limits to anything but token reduction, (and that certainly is what it implies), it’s pretty easy to determine how less-than-serious he is about deficit reduction.  Add that to his comment to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday two weeks ago about not wanting to talk about solutions, and this “pledge” becomes comical.  Strike two.

Finally, Republicans propose to cut costs by de-funding healthcare initiatives and lowering taxes.  The healthcare initiatives they propose to cut have yet to be funded.  Pretty easy to take back something you haven’t yet delivered.  But refusing to fund healthcare changes would leave Republicans with no way to address the current almost (and in some cases actual) double-digit growth in healthcare expenditures.  Add to that the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for all income earners (about 750 billion dollars), and the continuation of at least one foreign military conflict and we could likely have a budget deficit under a Republican House that was larger than it was under Democratic control.  Strike Three.

The truth about the “Pledge to America” is that it isn’t.  There is only one fiscally honest Republican in the House of Representatives and his name is Paul Ryan.  Ryan’s solutions for reducing deficit and debt are not my solutions, but at least he understands that in order for anything to be accomplished without any sort of tax increase (if that is even possible), Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and Defense must all endure dramatic cuts, all of which would be deeply unpopular.  And it is telling that not a single other Republican on Capitol Hill has signed on to Ryan’s proposal.

It would be nice if Americans could talk about these things like adults, instead of fourth graders throwing rocks at each other on the playground.  If your family was to encounter financial hardship and needed to take additional steps to make ends meet, you could either reduce your expenses, increase your income, or some combination of both.  I would suggest that reducing expenses AND pursuing employment offering higher levels of compensation might be the best course of action to take.  A similar approach of decreased expenses and increased revenues would probably be beneficial to America’s current fiscal situation.  But the further down the road of nonsensical pledges we travel, the harder it is going to be to return to any semblance of fiscal sanity.