The grossest misperception about the great budget deadlock is the widespread notion, fed by the media, that this is just business as usual. In fact, it is the opposite of business as usual. If this were business as usual, the Republicans would have found a nice, cozy compromise using phony numbers and meaningless projections, claimed victory and gone home happy.
It is exactly that kind of usual Washington business, conducted annually over the last 15 years, that has given us our raging deficits.
Instead, the Republicans are taking an enormous beating in the polls. There is nothing in this politically for them, other than the fact they actually believe they are bound by the commitment they made in the ’94 elections to balance the budget.
Politicians are routinely denounced, justly, for tacking and trimming and making expedient compromises to bring cheap popularity and re-election. And now along comes a freshman Republican class that is clearly risking its political future by insisting on highly unpopular entitlement cuts. Instead of getting credit for doing the unusual in Washington, standing on a principle that is bringing them nothing but grief in the polls, they are being denounced for inflexibility. “Are the GOP Freshmen Out of Control?” asked CNN’s “Talk Back Live” show last Wednesday, a typical example of the media slant on the issue.
Indeed, the flip side of the bad press the “out-of-control” Republicans have gotten for sticking to the balanced budget is the lavish praise accorded Congress’ retiring political centrists. The retirement of many moderates, particularly in the Senate, has occasioned an outpouring of nostalgic and sympathetic coverage whose general theme is that the voices of reason have been stilled, driven out of a Congress taken over by Visigoths.
Now, the retirement of many of these senators is indeed a loss. On a host of specific issues, these centrists have done good works. But on the central systemic problem of our government–its inability to rein in its relentless and ruinous growth–centrism has failed utterly. Indeed, it is precisely the spirit of compromise, the instinct for splitting differences and, finally, the acquiescence to bipartisanly convenient fictions as a way to bridge irreconcilable gaps between spending and revenues that has created the $5 trillion mountain of debt that we are laboring under today.
On this issue we need radicalism. To understand the price of delay one has only to look at France, wracked by enormous social upheaval when its government tried finally, belatedly, to rein in the monstrous welfare state it had created.
Deficits count. And the reason the deficit problem is particularly acute today is that for the last 15 years we have been incurring huge deficits–wartime deficits–in peacetime. Such deficits are simply unsustainable. That would be true under any circumstances, but it is alarmingly true today because of the huge demographic anomaly of the Baby Boom.
In 15 years, Baby Boomers will start retiring. Instead of paying taxes into the Treasury–as they are doing now during their peak earning years–they will be drawing money out in the form of Social Security and Medicare. Unless we begin curbing the explosive rate of growth of these entitlements–starting with Medicare–the burden of funding the boomers’ retirement will simply crush the economy.
It is true that this explosive deficit spending began with Reagan and his free lunch tax cut. But
Clinton’s performance is as deft as it is shameful. The stakes today for the country’s fiscal future are higher than ever. In 1995, with interest on the debt costing the Treasury $240 billion a year and Baby Boom retirement only 15 years away, wartime deficits are far more dangerous than they were in 1980 when debt service was a mere $52 billion a year and Baby Boom retirement was 30 years away.
Clinton knows this. In fact, he campaigned on balancing the budget in five years. Now this champion poll-surfer is savaging the opposition for trying to balance it in seven.
The Republicans have offered the first serious attack on middle-class entitlements that this country has seen in years. And Clinton is making them pay. If he succeeds, no one in his right political mind will try again for years. Then we’ll really be back to business as usual.
