While traveling last week in the Midwest, it was clear that people continue to view Washington with unamused disdain. The scandals of the capital seem endless; the policy battles, inconsequential.
The first may be right, but the second is not. Still, watching the slow pirouettes of the dancers in this year’s version of the Budget Ballet, it’s understandable that voters think this is all about posturing and of little importance to them.
One day President Clinton nixes the suggestion for a commission to recompute the cost-of-living index. The next, anonymous White House aides whisper that he’d still like to see that money-saving adjustment made. One day Speaker Gingrich calls for abolition of the estate and capital gains taxes. The next day House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio) dismisses it as mere “locker-room talk.”
Viewing this spectacle from the other side of the Appalachians, in a springtime of fierce and unpredictable weather, the federal budget seems a gauzy and ephemeral matter, far removed from the harsh realities of snowstorms and floods.
But two volumes–one looking back and the other looking ahead–help explain why the start-and-stop negotiations between the White House and the congressional Republicans really are important.
The backward look and historical perspective are supplied by two Washington journalists, George Hager of Congressional Quarterly and Eric Pianin of The Washington Post, in their newly published book called “Mirage.” They describe the antecedents of the current runaway national debt–it turns out that a Massachusetts colony official set the precedent for deficit spending in pre-Revolution days–and the unhealthy political forces that have deepened the problem so drastically in the past 20 years.
“To the uninitiated,” they write, “Washington’s endless annual bickering over the budget seemed like a juvenile brawl that would end as soon as the politicians grew up and got serious. . . . This was no trivial fight over numbers but a grueling battle to the political death over competing concepts of the proper role of government and the right to shape the nation’s values. The budget is not just some arcane and indigestible collection of dollar figures but a detailed statement of what the nation cares about and what its priorities are. . . .”
Hager and Pianin do a masterly job of explaining why Democrats and Republicans have been unable to agree on those priorities and why their frustrated efforts to reach consensus have set off what they call “a hopeless cycle of revenge” that has been going on for two decades now and has developed a life of its own.
Reading this sad history makes you understand how difficult is the challenge of reaching substantive agreement this year.
To grasp how important such an agreement would be–if it were more than a quick fix that simply postponed the day of reckoning–ask your representative or senator to send you a copy of a newly issued report from the Congressional Budget Office entitled “Long-Term Budgetary Pressures and Policy Options.”
In charts and text, CBO Director June E. O’Neill, her colleague Douglas Hamilton and others describe the crunch that is coming when the Baby Boom generation of Clinton, Gingrich et al. starts reaching retirement age in about a dozen years. When that whole generation is retired, in 2030, benefits for the elderly from three big government programs–Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid–which now cost 8 percent of the nation’s annual output will take at least twice as much from the expanded pie.
The projected growth in those three programs alone and in the annual interest payments on our burgeoning national debt would be enough, the CBO report says, to push annual budget deficits to levels seen “only during major wars.” Within 40 years, the debt would dwarf the size of the U.S. economy by a larger multiple than ever before in our history.
All that woe seems to be off in the future, but in fact, the critical decisions are the ones being made right now–or being delayed by another round of partisan wrangling. “The economy will benefit greatly if policymakers act sooner rather than later to forestall the budgetary problems on the horizon,” the CBO report says. Reducing spending enough to bring the budget into balance by 2002 could eliminate as much as half the looming fiscal crisis. Changes in Social Security and Medicare, if enacted now, would give people time to adjust before they take effect. If delayed, they will be far more disruptive.
What’s at stake is no less than the next generation. That’s why we need to rouse ourselves and pay attention.
