In the firestorm that has surrounded government budget debates on the state and federal level, folks from all sides are chiming in. Tea Party-supported "fiscal conservatives" have entered the scene on a mission. I am a firm believer in fiscal discipline, but much of the controversy has been over what amounts to politics as usual. As I've discussed in recent posts, states everywhere are slashing programs that are social investments - research, public media, education and healthcare. Scott Walker is using the budget crisis in Wisconsin to strip state employees of collective bargaining rights, describing their benefits as luxurious and their salaries as disproportionate to the private sector (by the way, 60% of public employees have college degrees versus 20% of non-government workers). The problem with his argument is that stripping collective bargaining has nothing to do with the current budget. It is nothing more than manipulating a current crisis to change the rules of the game.
The federal government is following suit, as new Republicans are vying to make good on pledges of cutting $100 billion from the 2010 budget. Refusing to touch the sacred cows of defense and Medicare (which along with Social Security account for 88% of the federal budget), they take aim at "discretionary spending," namely things that people who vote for Democrats use. All of this is done in the name of "fiscal conservatism," but as blogger Jim Wallis of God's Politics points out, what is being sold as fiscal conservatism is simply politics as usual:
This is not fiscal conservatism. It's just politics.
Hey Will, it's Mikey. I wish you wouldn't have shown me this, because now I'm going to be even more distracted from work.
ReplyDeleteI think one thing I would add to your analysis here is the reluctance we have for increasing taxes. In our current political climate, "increasing taxes" seems like a dirty word (or words).
I, like most everyone, agree that there are superfluous areas of government that could be cut. However, the problem is nobody seems to agree which those areas are exactly. For one example, see the results from a January Reuters poll at http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/12/us-usa-poll-spending-idUSTRE70B38620110112. Take a look at how few elements of the budget have consensus agreement toward cutting them.
I would certainly be willing to sacrifice some of the things I find valuable if I knew that others were, too. Unfortunately, those who are being asked to sacrifice are disproportionately young and poor. The things that seem to not be touched are people's taxes, defense spending and the large entitlement programs (and from those, the largest impending problem seems to be Medicare). Until we're all willing to make sacrifices in those areas, the results of the debates on the rest of the budget will be inconsequential to future deficits and possibly very harmful to our future society.