George Rebane

[This is a transcript of my regular KVMR 89.5 commentary that aired today 18 March 2011.]

Conservative commentators, blogs, and opinion rags are claiming that on spending cuts they have Democrats on the run.  The big news is that during the last five weeks the GOP House has extracted $10B in cuts.  Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist and arguably the dean of conservative Washington political pundits, said on Fox News that “If you are getting, as we are, a cut of $2 billion a week, then even in the continuing resolutions that’s real money.”

What in hell is going on inside that funny farm on the Potomac?  The current year’s deficit is going to be way north of one trillion dollars that adds to a national debt already equal to our $14T annual gross domestic product.  Counting actual known unfunded entitlement obligations of our federal government, a more realistic debt would be in the $55T neighborhood.  And through the accounting haze in which the feds operate, we can see liabilities that double that total in the next twenty years.

But let’s not go there.  Let’s just stick with what the White House and the Congressional Budget Office agree on – that for the foreseeable future, for the next ten years we’ll be adding at least a trillion dollars in deficits annually to the national debt.  For the numerically challenged, a trillion is a thousand billion dollar bills.  Without even taking off one shoe, I can divide a thousand billion by two billion dollar cuts per week and come up with 500 weeks or almost ten years to work off enough spending to just about handle one year of deficits.

That is not the kind of progress that calls for optimism and celebration, even among the dimwits that make up most of our electeds.  But this is the game we are now playing for the indefinite future in the ongoing two and three continuing resolutions that is the best that Congress can do to fund the government.  Recall that it all started last fall, before the elections, when a Congress and Administration under full Democrat control could not come up with a budget for this fiscal year, and so they didn’t.  Getting the hint that the electorate was going to take them to the woodshed in November for their two year screw-up, the Dems kicked this can waaay down the road.

Back then everyone in the country knew that the budget funding of the Obama ‘stimulus policies’ was going to be a fiscal catastrophe.  And the Democrats didn’t want to attach their name to such a budget.  Being full-fledged members of the political class with all the ethics pertaining thereto, they would let the new Republican House try to get their chestnuts out of the fire.  And the Republicans, with full tea party endorsements, pounded their chests and declared their willingness to take on the challenge and put a budget in place that contained real spending cuts, cuts in the hundreds of billions that would make a real dent in the baked in deficit they inherited.

As we know, it didn’t turn out that way.  The Dems were way too smart for those new freshman whippersnappers.  First they did some bamboozle accounting on what would count as a spending cut, and before we knew it, the hundred billion dollar goals were whittled down to a nominal $60B or so.  And then even that number was stalled so that the best the Republicans could do was go on a bit by piece program of snipping a billion here and a billion there in a week to week dance of those wonderful dodgy continuing resolutions.  And for what?

Well, the killer argument that the refusenik Democrats presented to the nation was that the GOP wanted to impose heartless and excessive cuts on necessary spending programs, and that these could not be countenanced, and that if the Republicans pressed their cuts the Dems would shut down the government and everyone would again blame it on the Republicans.  Never mind that the dollar amounts, as we have seen, were drips in the bucket that didn’t even touch the 800 lbs spending gorillas of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.  Only in Washington can someone argue with a straight face that cutting more than $2B a week out of a trillion dollar annual deficit is ‘excessive’.

So how are the Republicans now ducking the issue.  If they’re not putting out lame statements and blog posts which paper over a clear political and budgetary defeat, then they are just being real quiet about the next continuing resolution that appears to be the only palatable placebo to both parties.  But that’s not what the Republicans were elected to do.

The game here is world class poker with world class stakes.  The GOP should make it clear that they are ready for a government shutdown if the Democrats insist on ignoring the country’s headlong rush to bankruptcy.  Can you imagine what kind of ‘shutdown’ our government and the economy would suffer when the world’s lenders will no longer buy our bonds and printing dollars is all that we have left to fund government?

Which finally brings me to my favorite congressman, Tom McClintock (pictured), whom I have supported for what seems like forever.  How come Congressman McClintock voted for the continuing resolution this Tuesday?  This third in a series of CRs will fund the government until April 8th, and it is no different than the two recent ones that preceded it.  This vote looks like a capitulation.  Where is our epitome of fiscal conservancy now that the stakes really do involve the survival of God, country, motherhood, and apple pie?

My name is Rebane and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, on NCTV, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Russ Steele on NCMW has a complimentary post giving names of the Republicans who stayed their elected course.]

[20mar2011 update]  It turns out that Congressman McClintock did make the following comments regarding his YES vote on the Continuing Resolution on 15 March 2011.  “H.J. Res. 48 – Three Week Continuing Resolution to Fund the Government: YES.  This resolution makes actual reductions of $6 billion, bringing to $10 billion the total cuts approved since March 4th.  However, at this rate, it would take 15 years to balance the budget – obviously far too long.  Experts have warned us that we have at best five years to prevent a catastrophic fiscal crisis and possible collapse of the government.  I support this rate of reduction only as a preliminary stop-gap for the current fiscal year.   Much deeper cuts must be made in the annual budget for 2012, and I am still convinced that the House majority will stand behind its commitment to do so.”