The most harmful lies are the ones we tell ourselves. Our country will be in trouble until both its citizens and its leaders stop engaging in willful self-delusion. Count both the Obama administration and the tax-protesting Tea Party crowd among the deluded.
For the better part of 30 years, we have been digging ourselves into a fiscal hole by running large budget deficits at times, when no credible economic theory supported doing so. Now, in the middle of the worst worldwide economic slowdown in 80 years, a majority of economists support some level of deficit spending, at least as a temporary necessary evil. But virtually none supports it over the long run and most see great harm, particularly in the face of the Baby Boom retirement already under way.
The Obama administration and other Democrats, instead of proposing a credible plan for eventual fiscal balance, resort to unrealistic economic projections and the “asterisks” of unspecified future spending cuts that became common practice in the Reagan administration.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party tries cynically to don the mantle of fiscal rectitude, ignoring the fact that 74 percent of the debt was run up under the last three Republican presidents and that no Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower ever submitted a balanced budget to Congress. They likewise present no credible plan for ending deficits after the recession ends.
In this situation, cynicism and self-delusion don’t bode well for our nation’s future. But that is what we have been getting recently.
Cynicism seeped from every pore of Obama’s proclamation that his Cabinet had to cut $100 million from their budgets this year and his assertion that this would reduce the deficit over time. If you cut that much from spending every day it would take more than 40 years to reduce this year’s projected deficit to zero.
Such manipulative acts harm the nation because they add to citizen self-delusion, further delaying meaningful action.
But it would be harder to find anything more saturated with willful self-delusion than the Tea Party protests held in many states last week. The protesters think taxes are too high and condemn deficit spending. I suppose they also dislike halitosis and tornadoes.
What do they call for to fix the problem? They call for an end to congressional earmarks in appropriations bills. Good idea, but nearly as phony a response to structural deficits as Obama’s $100 million cuts.
The Tea Party crowd would have more credibility if they had chanted calls to abolish all farm subsidies and student aid and waved placards to repeal the Medicare drug benefit, to shrink the Army and Air Force to 1938 levels and return the Navy to coastal defense as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson.
What these simpletons are unwilling to acknowledge is that if you don’t cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, are not willing to shrink the armed forces drastically, and don’t repudiate our contractual commitment to pay interest on the national debt, you could cut all other federal spending to zero and we still would have a substantial budget deficit.
You cannot close the deficit without raising taxes, period.
Other nations, including Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, which all faced similar deficits a decade or so ago, did that and found they could still prosper.
Until the general public is willing to face the facts in the choices we confront, politicians will continue to pander to self-delusion. And we will leave our grandchildren with a poorer nation.
© 2009 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.