Since President Bush took office, our federal debt has increased by $1.4 trillion dollars. A fortnight ago, Congress voted on increasing the amount by which the federal government can borrow by $800 billion. If our tax dollars were like a Master Card, they just raised the available credit.
Which is all fine and dandy, because the option was simply not to fund the federal government. That means no war on terrorism, no federal prosecutions, no EPA, no interstates, no electricity for Tennessee — a whole lot of nothing going on.
That’s impossible in political terms, so instead, we just keep going further and further into debt.
President Bush literally hasn’t seen a spending bill he won’t sign. For being a member of the party of good business and fiscal conservatism, Bush, our first CEO president, is running this particular company into the ground, just like the string of failed businesses he left behind in Texas. Retiring conservative commentator William F. Buckley claims Bush’s reckless spending will go down as a stunning failure to the conservative’s viability as a national party.
How far into debt can we possibly go before it really starts affecting the country? In real terms, it already is. The dollar is plummeting to the Euro, and only the most hard-headed optimists think that our days of industrial and economic might can continue with a debt load approaching absurd proportions. In fact, last week Stephen Roach, lead Wall Street analyst at Morgan Stanley, predicts only a 10 percent chance that our country will avoid “economic Armageddon” and he places the blame squarely on tax cuts and the mountainous debt.
Bush pledged to reduce the federal debt in half, but that seems to be absolutely impossible given fiscal projections going beyond 2013. Especially if Bush’s ill-conceived tax cuts become permanent. Of course, tax cuts are “permanent” only as long as it takes Congress to change them again.
Congress just passed a spending bill for 2005. It weighs 14 pounds and spends $388 billion dollars. In terms adjusted for inflation, it virtually freezes spending in all departments except Homeland Security and NASA. Remember, we have to fight terrorists everywhere in our global war on terror, and in fact, interplanetary terrorism is something to consider and be prepared for. That’s why we’re going to Mars.
So what are the options? Will this change?
A few radical conservatives (and libertarians) think that with massive privatization you eliminate a lot of debt by simply breaking off chunks of the federal government. You also get a more efficiently run set of services.
Unfortunately, there is no profit in managing the environment, maintaining highways or prosecuting criminals. One of the reasons the government even provides services like watching nuclear power plants or disposing of hazardous waste is that there is no market to do it otherwise. So cutting those parts of the government off and letting them run in the free market would be a fool’s errand. Very quickly they would cease to exist.
Maybe that’s the point though. Rep. Tom De Lay of Texas once said he couldn’t think of a single business regulation that was good for businesses. This all-or-nothing thinking is both ignorant and irresponsible, but it appeals to a lot of people who don’t actually know anything about economics or market forces. They think that unfettered capitalism will actually work itself out, instead of coalescing around giant firms with no ethics.
Another option is actually to spend only what we take in. This is known as a balanced book approach, or as politicians also call it, pay as you go. This is also known as common sense.
Republicans can no longer castigate Democrats for being the party of big government. At least when Democrats were in power, they had balanced budgets and could afford what they proposed.
Our current leadership simply mortgages the future of America by pretending there is no bill collector at the end of the day.
Now at this point I could make the statement that if Americans ran their households like the federal government, it would be negligent and bordering on illegal. Unfortunately, this is how Americans run their households — we have the largest consumer debt of any country in the world.
But hey, they’re just taking their lead from our president, who understands neither the simple concept of spending what you have or how to cut down on his own fiscal irresponsibility.
By the way, Bush’s budget director promised a pork-reduced spending bill. That was a ridiculous overstatement, because politicians will slip in their pet projects no matter what happens. To wit, $1 million to the Missouri pork producers to figure out how to turn pig waste into an alternative fuel source.
Pork-reduced, indeed.
Rob Deters ([email protected]) is a third-year law student.
