Republicans, in particular, fell victim to the stalking shadow of the 1995 government shutdown. That year, Republicans shut down the government over disputes with Clinton and the Democrats over spending. The media and the Democrats attacked the GOP for its “heartless” ways and failure to carry on “good government.” The myth spun out of that shutdown was that as a result, Republicans got creamed in 1996 at the polls. The reality, however, was far different: House Republicans lost only nine seats that year. In fact, nationally, the House GOP ran even with the Democrats, scoring 47.8 percent of the vote to the Democrats’ 48.1 percent. And in the Senate, Republicans actually picked up two seats. Contrary to the myth, the 1995 government shutdown did not damage the Republicans and forced the Democrats to work toward balancing the budget and reforming welfare.
In 2011, however, the Republicans were spooked by the media’s and the kooks’ constant invocations of 1995. So once again, the Republicans caved and agreed to another stink bomb of a budget deal. For perspective, the federal government under Obama has been spending about $11 billion per day. Under the April 2011 agreement, the sides agreed to “cut” $38 billion, which times out to under four days’ worth of federal spending.
The agreement had two big outcomes that put Republicans on the losing side. First, the Democrats successfully termed $38 billion in reductions as “cuts.” By calling them “cuts,” they could scream about how the GOP wanted to throw Grandma in the snow (a rhetorical absurdity usually reserved for battles over Social Security), make Grandpa eat cat food (another lefty oldie but goodie), and “kill women” (a new kook hit uttered gleefully by Democratic congresswoman Louise Slaughter). They could then appear to reluctantly go along with these “cuts” and get credit from a public desperate to see fiscal restraint and government shrunk.
These “cuts” were no such thing. The $38 billion number was an amount being denied to an imaginary budget never adopted. This deal came after two previous years in which Obama so increased baseline spending that he had everyone working from incredibly elevated levels. If you spend $50, then you spend $100, and then you propose to spend $150, and someone asks you to cut your budget, so you slash $10, and now you are spending $140. Is anybody buying that that’s a true “cut”? The April 2011 budget deal actually ended up costing $3.2 billion more in the short term, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and federal spending actually increased that year by 5 percent. So much for “cuts.” In an act of rebellion against a country and Congress that didn’t buy his sincerity in budget cutting, Barry broke out the Uncle Sam MasterCard and went online to order a Hoodie-Footie Pajamagram to cheer himself up.
Adding new entitlement to injury, the deal didn’t even address stopping or at least slowing funding for ObamaCare, the Biggest of All Redistributionist Programs and the promise of defunding and repeal of which got many Republicans elected in the first place. In their first opportunity to really take it on, the GOP whiffed.
The Republican leadership, in getting totally maneuvered, gave away its major weapon in the fight, a weapon given to them by the Tea Party and the American people through their big 2010 election victories: the leverage they had in holding out the possibility of a government shutdown. House Speaker John Boehner actually said, “We’ll never shut down the government.” Never? What a Junior League mistake. This is Politics 101, and frankly War 101: you never tell the enemy what you will do, and you never tell them what you will not do. And the GOP disarmed itself, both for that battle and for the budget and debt battles to come. From that point on, the Democrats knew that not only would the GOP not fight for serious budget cuts, they would cave at the first threat of a possible shutdown. Nobody on the Republican side was running grand strategy. The Democrats are ruthless street fighters, and Republicans always succumb to the false attack that they are the thugs. If this were professional sports or the military, John Boehner would have found himself on a bus back to the minor leagues or doing push-ups in front of a drill sergeant. You never telegraph your moves to an angry mob of loopy Bolshevik nuts.
The Democrats got their budget, almost fully intact given the elevated baseline, and they saw the GOP run away like Bill Clinton from a jealous husband.
Moreover, Obama and the kooks got the benefit of hilarious spin saying the GOP “won.” They knew the GOP didn’t win, and that’s why they were happy to let them have their little Charlie Sheen “duh, winning” headlines.
For years prior to this deal, Republicans assured us that they “got it” about spending and the seriousness of the deficit problem. In April 2011, they got together with the spendaholics on the other side and decided that the crisis they have been telling us about isn’t really serious enough to deal with seriously. It’s the status quo all the way, baby! And of course, their weaselly cowardice on that first big budget deal after they took control of Congress set the stage for further wimpiness over the debt ceiling and later budget fights. Republicans always seem to be the last group of people on earth to discover that liberals will lie, cheat, steal, or feign ignorance to get whatever they want.
There was, however, a conservative game-changer. Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, has shown enormous courage in trying to move his party and the nation back to fiscal responsibility. In April 2011, the same month his party agreed to the hot mess of a budget deal, Ryan introduced the Path to Prosperity. The plan was both dynamically pro-growth and adamantly reformist. Put simply, it argued for $6.2 trillion in spending cuts over ten years by bringing spending to below 2008 levels and a reduction in marginal tax rates, eliminating income taxes on capital gains, dividends, and interest, as well as the corporate tax rate, the death tax, and the alternative minimum tax. It proposed reforming the entitlements by moving Medicare to a premium-support model, in which Medicare would pay a lump sum to the plan chosen by the beneficiary, subsidizing its cost, and changing Medicaid so the states would receive block grants to give them flexibility in handling their individual Medicaid needs, particularly once the labyrinthine new mandates of ObamaCare kick in. (Ryan stuck to his guns and proposed a similar reformist budget for FY2013.)
Ryan’s budget sought to empower individuals through increased choice and less government involvement. It also aimed to save those very entitlement programs from extinction. In fact, Rick Foster, the chief actuary of Medicare, endorsed the Ryan plan as the best way to save Medicare from insolvency.
The Democrats reacted in typical Drama Queen fashion. “Hands off my Medicare!” shrieked former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as she led the charge against the Ryan plan. “Dead on arrival” was another one of her clever retorts. The problem is that Ryan and his plan’s supporters are operating on the level of logic, reality, and American values, while the kooks are operating on the level of thug redistributionism. If any of their redistributive pillars were dismantled and turned into empowerment vehicles for the individual rather than the government, a major part of their socialist superstructure would collapse. They could not allow it.
On April 15, 2011, the House passed the Ryan budget 235 to 193. No Democrats voted for it, and only four Republicans voted against it. One month later, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid saw to it that it died in the Senate by a vote of 57 to 40.
Republicans have been a bit politically schizophrenic as they deal with the new fiscal austerity demands from the people. While they went along with the weak 2011 budget deal and punted on the debt-ceiling deal, they also voted resoundingly for the Ryan plan, which would have dealt responsibly with both immediate and longer-term budget challenges by encouraging growth and restructuring existing programs in order to salvage them. Many Republicans argue that they require majorities in the Congress as well as control of the White House in order to advance these reforms. That’s a fair argument. But it would have been nice to have seen a greater consistency from them as they fought the early battles for real spending cuts, when the Tea Party wind at their backs was at its strongest.
Bec
ause they didn’t hold the line early, Obama moved even more shamelessly to ratchet up spending. In early September 2011, just five weeks after agreeing to some minuscule cuts and restraints on spending as part of the debt-ceiling deal and presiding over the first humiliating downgrade of the nation’s debt, Obama summoned a joint session of Congress to call for another half trillion dollars for redistribution under the guise of a “jobs bill.” Two weeks prior to Obama’s announcement, Democratic representative Maxine Waters had expressed her desire for a $1 trillion spending package. Obama must have welcomed that statement because it made his call for half a trillion dollars seem reasonable.
Obama then began to claim that his latest spending extravaganzas would “be paid for,” but by that he meant with nearly $2 trillion in tax hikes. The logistics of deficit and debt reduction would be conveniently punted to a deficit “supercommittee,” which didn’t even make it to the usual last-minute, hair-on-fire phase of congressional panic. It just petered out, after Republicans indicated a willingness to give on revenue increases but Democrats refused to give an inch on their pledge to raise taxes by over $1 trillion. Meanwhile, the Obama Spending Bus rolled on, with Obama proposing yet another $3.8 trillion budget for 2013 with no restraint in sight.
Obama did not make a series of rookie mistakes when he demanded ever more spending. His objective has always been clear: to spend as much money as possible in order to “remake America” by essentially bankrupting her, driving down her currency, and stoking class envy as a way to generate social upheaval. An economically weakened America would more easily fold into redistributive policies. An economically crippled America would be less likely to exert hard power on the world stage, thereby allowing a redirection of necessary funds to the domestic redistributionist dream—and to the global redistributionist dream as well.
In a spasm of leftist honesty, Obama once said, “At some point, you’ve made enough money.” By that, he meant that the leftists, as the vanguards of social and economic “justice,” will determine which of your assets, income, and property shall be yours and which shall be turned over to the state for redistributive purposes. This is exactly the kind of capriciousness of an all-powerful state against which the Founders built protections. But the leftists have found ways around those defenses because the Founders never anticipated the rise of this particular brand of kook.
There always was a clear method to Obama’s spending madness. The staggering spending was designed not to help the economy but to rapidly expand the welfare state so that it would be extraordinarily difficult to ever roll it back. The Mad Hatter in the White House is not mad at all, but a quite sane and ruthless operative who knows exactly what he is doing.
I See Debt People
* * *
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
—Herbert Hoover, January 16, 1936
When President Hoover made that statement, the gross national debt was $34 billion. Today the federal government spends that amount in three days.
The United States National Debt Clock, located on the Web at www.USDebtClock.org, should come with a warning sign like the kind you see before you board the Space Mountain roller coaster at Disney World: WARNING! FOR SAFETY, YOU SHOULD BE IN GOOD HEALTH AND FREE FROM HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE, HEART, BACK OR NECK PROBLEMS, MOTION SICKNESS OR OTHER CONDITIONS THAT COULD BE AGGRAVATED BY THIS ADVENTURE. EXPECTANT MOTHERS SHOULD NOT RIDE. The faint of heart should not look at the National Debt Clock. Every other American should look at it daily. The speed with which the debt numbers fly upward is both fascinating and horrifying: fascinating that any government could spend so much money and accrue such staggering debt so fast, and horrifying because it’s our government spinning those numbers ever higher.
It used to be that the word “trillion” was used only in astronomy, and even there, it was used only sparingly. When the late astronomer Carl Sagan wanted to invoke enormity, as in countless stars or light-years in distance, he would use the ambiguous term “billions and billions,” and it sounded so huge. Today, our national debt is hurtling though time and space toward $17 trillion, or 17,000 billions. One trillion seconds ago, much of North America was still deeply buried in the Ice Age. Today Sagan’s phrase—“billions and billions”—sounds positively quaint.
On June 9, 2009, just a few months after Obama’s inauguration, the Associated Press ran an article that unwittingly revealed the new president’s attitude, strategy, and objective regarding massive new spending and the inevitably huge new debt. The headline: “Obama: It’s OK to Borrow to Pay for Health Care.” The tagline of the story: “Obama—proposed budget rules allow deficits to swell to pay for health care plan.” The piece then laid out Obama’s position. “President Barack Obama … proposed budget rules that would allow Congress to borrow tens of billions of dollars and put the nation deeper in debt to jump-start the administration’s emerging health care overhaul.... It would carve out about $2.5 trillion worth of exemptions for Obama’s priorities over the next decade. His health care reform plan also would get a green light to run big deficits in its early years.” (Emphasis added.)
All of the bank-breaking spending was designed to undercut the nation’s economic strength and its global exceptionalism. If the United States had both a crippled economy and a crippling debt, it could no longer retain its status as the global number one. And the kooks intend to do the takedown, mainly by spending us past Debt Purgatory and into Debt Hell. And once we reach Debt Hell, Obama intends to do two things during his trip to damnation. The first is to give a high five to his old buddy, Saul Alinsky. The second is to shake down Lucifer for all of his extra cash, so that Barry can spend Beelzebub’s life savings too.
For years, the leftists registered phony “concern” about the deficit and debt to mask their true intentions: How else to explain Obama’s decision to empanel by executive order a “deficit commission” only to blow off their entire set of recommendations? Or his repeated claims to want to get the deficit spending under control, only to follow them with demands for ever more spending? Or his failure to bat an eye when Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt based primarily on an unwillingness to restrain government spending?
Obama constantly put on the mask of fiscal discipline as he pretended to offer support for things that would actually reduce the longterm debt crisis, such as entitlement reform and meaningful spending cuts. But as soon as the Republicans became encouraged that he might actually mean it, he backed away from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security reform faster than Snooki from a pair of sensible shoes.
At first, Team Obama and the kooks were able to get away with the huge deficit spending and exploding debt because they couched their policies in terms of temporary crisis intervention, and because it took people a while to realize that this was no run-of-the-mill Democratic administration. Because Obama sang a melodious tune of moderation during the 2008 campaign, many people, including those on Wall Street, assumed that he would behave much as Bill Clinton had in office.
Of course, the death of HillaryCare and the Republican control of Congress helped check the wild spending impulses of Clinton and the kooks on his left. And let’s face it: all of the naked intern mambo Bill was doing in the White House kept him from focusing on too many left-wing pet projects at one time (HillaryCare was his wife’s idea).
For Clinton, the deficit was to be reduced. For Obama, the deficit is to serve as proof that his radical redistributionist regime is under way. It took the United States over 190 years from the start of constitutional government to amass $1 trillion in debt. Today we add $1 trillion about every nine months. In 1941, our public debt was about $43 billion, which averaged about $370 per citizen. Today, with a population that has about tripled, each American’s share is roughly $50,000. And the cost per taxpayer is about $140,000 and climbing. You might want to work a little harder.
When Bush left office, he was rightly assailed by fiscal conservatives for spending too much, as he had sig
ned into law a huge new entitlement in Medicare Part D and new federal education guidelines in No Child Left Behind. He left behind a 2008 budget deficit of $450 billion, in large part due to the initial $350 billion TARP payout—a onetime “extraordinary” budget item. In 2008, that deficit was about 3 percent of GDP. Obama blew up the annual deficit to about $1.5 trillion, or 11 percent of GDP.
When Obama took office, the total national debt was $10.6 trillion. In his first 945 days, Obama increased it by $4.247 trillion, the fastest increase under any president ever. Under President Bush, the nation’s debt increased $4.9 trillion, but it took him 2,648 days to do it.
The total national debt, which includes the debt held by the public as well as intragovernmental debt (that is, what one part of the government owes to another part), was an acute 69 percent of GDP at the end of the Bush years. Obama’s profligate spending has now pushed that level over 100 percent. (According to the Congressional Budget Office, the public debt–to–GDP ratio could reach 200 percent by 2037, assuming that the entire economy doesn’t collapse first.) The last time U.S. debt topped the size of the entire economy was in 1947 following the complete economic mobilization of World War II. At least then we had the salvation of the free world to show for it. By 1981, the debt-to-GDP ratio had dropped to 32.5 percent. And now, we’ve sailed back over the 100 percent of GDP mark with just a few recalled Chevy Volts and shrimp on a treadmill to show for it.
In just the first nine months of fiscal year 2011, the United States had already paid more to service its debt ($385 billion) than some 195 countries had in total annual economic output, including Nigeria, Sweden, the Philippines, Austria, and Switzerland.
What the (Bleep) Just Happened? Page 12