There is a dismaying symmetry about the debt-limit controversy. Today’s Left creates phony crises to rationalize action on its radically transformative program; today’s Right creates phony rationalizations to avoid addressing actual crises. Incrementally, yesterday’s radicalism becomes today’s norm.
The Right talks a good game about small government, constitutional government. But that is all it is: talk. When it gets down to brass tacks, like now, with our nation sinking into a death spiral of unsustainable, incalculable debt, the Right’s solution is to grow government while trusting that government will constrain government — at some future date, of course. And when someone has the temerity to say, “No, enough,” mainstream Republicans, aided by some in the conservative commentariat, are as quick as the Obama Left to marginalize that someone as an “extremist.”
Advertisement
So it was that Sen. John McCain, the very model of a progressive Rockefeller Republican, lambasted a surging GOP presidential hopeful, Rep. Michele Bachmann, for her uncompromising stance on the debt ceiling. By McCain’s Big Gummint lights, Bachmann is an extremist for refusing to indulge the notion that we should inflate by $2,500,000,000,000 (that’s not a typo) the credit line of a bankrupt nation that is officially $14,300,000,000,000 in the hole. (The true debt is more like $130,000,000,000,000 if we look beyond Uncle Sam’s Enronesque accounting practices.) And mind you, the $2.5 tril is just what’s necessary to get us through President Obama’s reelection, McCain’s 2008 campaign having already done its bit to ensure Obama’s election. Once the president’s second term is won, there would be nothing but trillions more in debt and debt-ceiling raises until, sooner rather than later, creditors stop the music and the country collapses.
Ironically, McCain’s manner of helping Obama this time is to frame Bachmann as Obama. As a senator running for president (which is pretty much all he did as a senator), Obama was famously intransigent in 2006, when Pres. George W. Bush sought an increase in the debt ceiling in order to finance the metastasizing welfare state wrought by insatiable leftist Democrats and Republican statists such as McCain. So now, McCain says Bachmann sounds like Obama, because she insists that the debt limit oughtn’t be raised by a dime. She needs to get with the program and agree to the borrowing of more trillions today in exchange for the promise of spending cuts . . . someday, no doubt the same day that fence gets built on the Mexican border.
But there is a huge difference. Senator Obama’s objection was crass political opportunism. He is as radical a redistributionist as has ever held high elected office in the United States, and his only real problem with Bush’s exorbitant spending and entitlement expansion is that they weren’t nearly enough for his tastes. When it came time to pay the freight — when it was certain the ceiling would be raised, so a nay vote made no practical difference — Senator Obama caviled about how bumping the debt limit signaled a failure of presidential leadership. His speech is so comically cynical in light of the last three years that it can’t be repeated often enough:
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies . . . Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
On March 20, 2006, when Obama performed this little soliloquy, Congress raised the debt ceiling from a little over $8 trillion to a little under $9 trillion. The move epitomized an orgy of government profligacy, responsible ultimately for the electoral routs that cost Republicans control of Congress and the White House. For all its outrageousness, though, the Bush-era binge doesn’t hold a candle to what followed.
In the five years since Obama’s Senate speech, the Democrats he leads have raised the debt ceiling by almost $5.5 trillion. To get a sense of what that means, it took over two centuries — from the adoption of the Constitution in 1787 until 1998 — for the United States to accumulate $5.5 trillion in debt. There has been a debt ceiling only since 1917 (and its current configuration did not take shape until 1939), but even by that shorter measuring stick, it took almost 80 years (i.e., until 1996) to bump up against a debt ceiling of $5.5 trillion. Obama has doubled that unfathomable amount in the blink of an eye.
And it’s not enough. It will never be enough. President Obama wants to add $2.5 trillion to our tapped-out credit card because, at the rocket speed of government borrowing, that is the minimum needed to get him through the election without any additional debt-limit crises. Such episodes would only call more attention to his promised “fundamental transformation” of the U.S. economy. If he gets his way on the debt ceiling and then wins a second term, that $2.5 trillion will be chump change: It will be impossible to calculate the additional trillions confiscated from the producers, the young, and the unborn for redistribution to Leviathan’s clientele of cronies, unionized bureaucrats, and subsidized sloth.
Thus outlining the case for eliminating baseline budgeting. Each and every one of us in the real world cannot go to our spouse and tell them that we are cutting our budget this year because we wanted to buy a Bentley, BUT I cut our budget because we are buying a Mercedes. This despite the fact that our income only allows for a three-year-old used pickup truck. Something needs to be done to bring Congress into the real world.
Rep. Bachmann is ready to eat her peas. The problem is that we think she's the one that's too idealistic.
Thanks for the article. One of very few that actually considers anything of what it would be like to do something meaningful. Bonus points for taking down Senator McMeaningless.
Uncommitted "Stimulus" funds should be sequestered immediately. Civilian federal employees should be given a choice between a 25% pay cut or out-the-door. Do you think that many of them could earn 75% of what they are milking the taxpayers for in the private sector?
There are so many programs that could easily be cut or outrightly eliminated. Earmarks first, then Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts, National Institutes of Health, agricultural and educational subsidies, Fish and Wildlife...
It's also time to start auctioning off assets. The USPS, federal land and buildings...
Obama is bluffing, because he doesn't have a pair. Never has, never will. His whole career has been one big bluff. It is time for the Republicans to call him. The Irish duo of McConnell and McCain (and others) want to fold.
The people are wise to Obama. He's down 47%-39% to a generic Republican. He owns our messes now, and will not be able to deflect blame. Plus, the more he talks, the lower he goes.
An outstanding piece Mr. McCarthy. I have never felt fear for our future the way I do now-not even in the 70s and 80s when the Cold War was still going strong. What makes me so angry is that the threat comes not from an Evil Empire in Asia, but from within. McCain has long been part of that threat, and Obama is the epitome of it.
"All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa . . . , with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Andy, absolutely excellent column again. You and Steyn make Saturday mornings looked forward to. The basic problem is that collectivism and freedom must always be on the march against each other. Now those on the freedom side, like Bachmann, have decided (a little belatedly for my taste), that freedom can retreat no more thus setting up one of the bigger battles of our life. We must either become Greece with a few more entrepreneurs or roll back Leviathan with actual cuts. Those, like Sen. McCain, who believe that somehow you can limit collectivism or have it proceed at the pace you deem acceptable, are in panic and lash out mode as they slowly start to realize that we have finally gotten to the point where they have to choose between default or admitting they are Bernie Madoff (both of which take away what they hold most dear, their personal political power). Of course, most will attempt the third way, as written here, through mystery cuts in some galaxy far, far away coupled with the continued printing, but that is not going to buy them much more time, eventually it ends up in default or massive cuts with all the societal and foreign policy fun that entails.
Never thought I'd feel relief that McCain lost. At least we don't have to suffer the pain of McCain's rudderless leadership having led us to the same exact place Obama has us. Great piece by McCarthy. Spot on.
Bravo McCarthy! A call to arms, a timely manifesto.
At what point do we realize that an exisential threat trumps politics? It's not about who we pin the apocalypse on, it's about avoiding the apocalypse.
Sure, the grownups in the room will point out that the politics can never be ignored, it is after all how things get done. This problem will NOT be solved if Obama is still in office at the end of 2012.
But might we also point out that McCain has spent a lot of years (and good men's careers and reputations) burnishing his maverick image and building centrist capital. If there was a better time in his entire LIFE to spend that capital to have his fellow Republicans' backs, can anyone tell me when that would be?
Unfortunately there are not yet enough voters, much less politicians, who get it. Like many other countries that have gone this route, we'll have to suffer hyperinflationary ruin before enough people get it.
Brilliant article. I'm not sure, though, that Republicans shouldn't settle for a true "dollar for dollar" type of deal, as long as there are no tax increases and actual cuts with no accounting gimmicks. They can explain to the voters that if they're given the Senate and the Presidency, they pledge to refuse any more debt ceiling increases. The voters may forgive them for not being able to get more, but I don't think we should forgive them if they demand less.
Unfortunately, given the dumbing down of the public in general (thank you, public education!) together with decades of sucking on the teats of the nanny state, not to mention our propensity to take no action until a crisis goes from a simmer to a full boil (see North Korea and Iran), I see this once great nation very much like the Titanic. We're on collision course with an iceberg called reality, and we've got way too much mass and momentum, and the rudder is way undersized to avoid collision.
Do not raise the debt cieling until September.
Make Obama and Geitner prove they can do their job-let them take 2 checks from grandma and it then becomes their fault.
Andrew and Bachman are right; stop them now!!! It will be Obamas choice to default kids NOT the stubborn GOP.
The prez and treasury decide what bills to pay first. It will be the ultimate game of government picking winners and losers. I wonder if the will ever pick COUNTRY FIRST!
11b
And here's the great part: It's not my job to come up with a plan to cut US spending by 40%. If I wanted that responsibility, I would run for congress.
Excellent aricle, Mr. McCarthy. I appreciate all the detail and depth you put into your article. Here's praying that Boehner and the majority of Republicans in Congress do the right thing, hold fast on the debt ceiling, and not let this crisis go to waste.
1. This problem has been brewing at least since the 30's with the advent of Social Security. In Amity Schlea's "The Forgetten Man" she quotes a member of the Roosevelt administration who basically protested that it was immoral to put the congress of 1985 (remember he is speaking in 1935) in the fiscal mess that the mathematicians of that time were predicting Social Security would become. In other words, they knew Social Security would fail from the start. In the mid 80's (1983 I believe) we increased withholding to delay the inevitable. It is amazing how accurate their predictions were as to when the crisis would begin.
My point is that since prior to 1935 we have been in deficit spending, with Social Security taking up the slack, preventing the debt explosion we are seeing now. Up until 2010 Social Security was in the black and the surplus was paying off a portion (obviously not all) of the deficit. Now it is in the red adding to the deficit.
This transitioning of Social Security from black to red is the major driver of the deficit.
Bush made the deficit problem worse and Obama made it worse yet, but we are not trying to reverse a 10 or 20 year problem, but at least a 70 to 80 year old problem, the shear magnitude of which has been largely hidden by the Social Security surplus. Which brings me to my second point.
2. It is impossible to expect a guy like John McCain (and any other old school guy in Washington) to be able to wrap his mind around this problem precisely because it is such a radical departure from the last 70 to 80 years. We are talking radical transformation that nobody alive today in the US (conservative or liberal, teapartier or communist) has witnessed in their lifetime. Perhaps there are examples in other countries but I don't know.
Anyone with half a brain should be terrified. This is not going to proceed without extreme risk and pain throughout the whole economy not just in the public sector. After 70-80 years, everybody is entwined in this deficit spending from apple farmers to zookeepers. The private sector is so massively entwined with the public sector in so many ways both overt and subtle that nobody will be able to track it all out and predict consequences before hand. Using economic terms, we are looking at creative destruction of historical magnitude.
The only reason to proceed with this transformation is that the current course takes us to certain and utter ruin. If we take control of things we might be able to control the crash. Have a crash landing instead of an out and out crash. After the crash things will likely improve but we have to survive it first.
I support Bachman and company, but with grave fear. Kind of like if I had massive inoperable cancer through my whole body and the doctor says I can either die or massive radiation and chemo will give me a 50-50 chance. I would support the treatment but I would be shaking.
Nobody should take this lightly and you better have some money in the bank, food in the cupboard, have good relations with friends and family (because you might need their help or vice-versa) and be ready for a rocky ride while this plays out.
I think McCarthy and Bachmann are too optimistic and not conservative enough. Everyone else I've read on the subject says that next year's revenues will not be enough to cover interest, entitlements and defense, so even if everything else is cut to zero (and it won't be), you would need to cut some of that core spending immediately. Default and the resulting interest rate hikes would probably be more (not less) likely and the cash flow problem would ratchet upwards, the immediate cuts would probably create a worldwide depression, people would suffer, Obama would be re-elected, extending the Bush tax rates would be impossible, the pressure for a VAT would grow, everyone would forget that Obama and the Democrats caused the problem, Republicans would probably lose elections for decades, the debt ceiling would be raised anyway, and the American ideal could be lost forever. The catastrophe we create could be worse than the one we are trying to avoid.
An important conservative principle: Things can always get worse.
