This post is in effect a response to a comment that Caroline Cox posted to my Post-Midterm Predictions, in which she inquired if all this Republican rhetoric of fiscal conservatism would actually translate into action.
I agree that it will be interesting to see if the deficit becomes a real policy issue rather than a mere line in a speech critiquing big government. While I empathize with Caroline’s skepticism, I think that this issue will get some actual attention from lawmakers. The deficit has kind of been the elephant in the room for a while, but the media has latched onto it now, and our own ARUSA, which Sam Barr and Peyton Miller explicate on FOX news here, makes painfully apparent that cutting earmarks isn’t going to solve the problem. (Let us all take a moment to appreciate the irony of Sam appearing on FOX.)
There are also lawmakers like Rand Paul—who might have some unsettling opinions but really hates big government— who, while they haven’t yet provided a detailed plan, seem committed to addressing budget shortcomings (watch a very interesting MSNBC interview here).
I think that its undeniable that Republicans have to at least appear to take some action on the deficit. What I’m increasingly becoming worried about is that the action they take will be manifested in a full out attack on the Affordable Care Act and nothing else. While I’m all for the Republicans promoting a more critical analysis of health care reform, I also think it is quite clear that that alone is not going to have any real impact on reducing the deficit.
If Congress is serious about addressing the deficit, changes have to be drastic and across the board. We’re talking about cutting funding for Medicare, Social Security, Defense, Tax Breaks (which the Republicans are coming out strongly in favor of: see Max’s and my analysis of Republican economic policy here). The New York Times recently ran an awesome interactive infographic that challenges readers to balance the budget through cutting spending and/or raising taxes. Try to do it. It’s hard.
Caroline points out that cutting “wasteful spending” is easy to talk about and hard to do, and she couldn’t be more right. People flip out when you try to take away things that they feel entitled to. Look at Greece, France, etc. Britain’s austerity measures and accompanying “Big Society” initiative (New Yorker piece here) are a perhaps better reflection of what drastic cuts here in the States would have to look like. The idea of Big Society, immensely interesting and deserving of a blog post all to itself, is not wholly incompatible with the localist bent of the Tea Party nor the grassroots public activism that Obama championed during the 2008 campaign and that promptly disappeared after he took office. So such changes aren’t totally implausible.
That’s not to say that they will happen; they almost certainly won’t. Such a plan would be too contrary to Obama’s leftist philosophy and too decisive for the Republicans, who seem to be running in circles at the moment.
So to some extent, Caroline is right: we shouldn’t expect drastic spending cuts in the coming term. However, I think the fact that people are talking seriously about spending will spur at least some semblance of action from Congress. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up being a priority of sorts for both sides of the aisle, as the Democrats (unfairly blamed for the deficit by Republicans) might even look to amend their image by partnering on serious budget reevaluation if the Republicans let them.
photo credit:http://middleofthefreakinroad.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/boehner-pledge.jpg