August 3, 2011
Elephant: 1 – Ass: Backwards — The Score From the Debt Debacle
I usually don’t do political analysis pieces, but in light of the deficit negotiations I feel compelled to offer my two cents on what is easily the most important piece of legislation passed under president Obama’s administration. That’s right. I said the most important. Forget the stimulus bill, to hell with the affordable care act, and even the ending of don’t ask don’t tell falls by the wayside when compared to the potential implications of this deficit reduction law. And yes, it’s a law now. Thank god.
To begin, I will be plain with my thesis: the republicans won. 
They won in ways that the democrats will be feeling for years. The red House of Representatives took the blue president and senate to the mat with the threat, which they made good on several times, to block any bill involving tax increases of any kind. Sure, the democrat controlled senate tried to do the same thing, but they drew a lot more flack because the house sent them so many more bills. During the height of the crisis, it seemed as if the house rolled out a bill to tackle the debt limit problem almost every day, and the senate voted each one of them down.
That marked difference between the house and the senate is the first facet of the republican victory. In the eye of the American public, the republican house made countless attempts to resolve the debt crisis. I’ll be the first to concede, most of the plans were farfetched, impractical, or even crazy. But, the fact remains, house republicans put out a large volume of legislation to resolve the problem, several times far enough out to avoid the crisis that the debt negotiations became. What did the senate do while this was happening? Vote these bills down.
Never mind offer an alternative. In the minds of many analysts, the only real debt/deficit proposal that came out of the senate prior to Reid’s compromise was the bill written by the vaunted “gang of six”, and even that faced massive hurdles of implementation; never mind the fact that the senators hadn’t bothered to spell out exactly which cuts came from where. The bottom line in all of this is that people saw the republicans at least trying to solve the deficit problem, and all democrats did, again in this perception, was stand there and shut down every plan the republicans had. They offered comparatively few alternatives relatively late in the process, and that hurt the democrats badly. The lasting legacy of the democratic side to these negotiations will be one of bickering and foot dragging as the nation flirted with financial Armageddon. Can’t speak for the democrats, but that’s not something I want over my head as an election year approaches.
However, things go even farther than a stigma for the democrats. The House, and by extension the Republican Party, has finally showed its teeth. It may not be nice for democrats to hear, but the democrats got taken to the mat over spending and taxation. And I mean to the freaking mat here. For weeks, senate democrats and the president both said that no bill without revenue increases would be approved. A few weeks later, guess what? The bill Obama signed is 100% spending cuts. Senator Reid quickly changed the subject when asked about this by reporters, touting the importance of having any debt ceiling increase rather than the ideal one for democrats.
What does this say about the Democratic Party? The senate? The President? Nothing good. In fact, it says, in effect , “if you press us hard enough, we’ll fold.” With the president facing sharp criticism over past reforms such as the Affordable Care Act, as well as growing momentum from the political right, this isn’t a message he can afford to send.
I could go on, but I’d probably run out of readers long before I run out of words. So, I’ll move quickly to the other major impact of this law: a profound shift in fiscal policy.
By fighting so vehemently against any kind of tax increase, while at the same time pushing an aggressive schedule of cost cutting, Republicans have managed to change Washington’s fiscal mindset to one of restraint over spending. The provisions contained in the act call for a bipartisan committee to scour the federal budget for another $1.2-1.5 trillion in additional cuts by Thanksgiving lest steep automatic cuts come into play and a balanced budget amendment be sent to the states.
Putting congress under this kind of gun shows that the bills writers truly intend to shrink federal spending to a sustainable level. This is evident when we look at just where these automatic cuts would be targeted: defense and federal entitlements. These two spending categories are near and dear to Republicans and Democrats respectively and provide a strong incentive to not only come up with additional cuts, but to enact them in a relatively timely manner, compared to how Congress normally acts that is.
So there it is. Every democrat who read this far probably wants to kill me and every republican wants to hug me…which is certainly an odd feeling for a left leaning independent. Either way, this is the state of things. Love it or hate it, the federal deficit needs to shrink lest the national debt grow to the point where it’s toxic to economic growth. How this can be done is a subject for a later post, and rest assured you’ll be hearing from me as the deficit and debt debate continue. For now, this is one guys take on the current political maelstrom.
