In the Congressional Sand Box

Well, they raised the national debt ceiling and agreed to some sort of budget reduction and everyone is running around with the usual posturing: both sides claim not to be happy with the outcome and both say they will send the most intractible politicians to the joint reduction committee. The result: they've kicked the budget wars down the road to where they will simply recur in stalemate in this committee. We raised the debt ceiling, which most people agreed had to be done, and scored very little in political gain or common good for the country.

And all this so the super rich don't have to pay their share of the taxes?  Please--those of you who argue that letting the rich keep their money creates jobs--where are they? The rich have kept their money in unprecedented amounts, so where's the employment?

If anyone wants to see the result of this so-called budget trimming, they should look at the FAA budget which Congress failed to authorize. Did we save money by freezing the FAA budget as the most naive Tea Baggers believe? Hell no! The Federal government has lost $250 million in fees so far that would ordinarily go into the public coffer. This money is going into the hands of the delighted airlines as windfall profit. This is exactly what is going to happen with all these efforts to reduce the national debt because these people are short-sighted and trying to apply the rules of microeconomics, such things as the home and business budget, onto macroeconimcs, finances written large as in national budgets and multinational corporate funds, some of which are larger than the entire funding base of the U.S.

I'm sorry Tea Baggers, but the rules of macroeconomics are vastly different from those of microeconomics. If you cut household spending you can save a few dollars and the benefit is personal. If you cut government spending, you cut jobs, contracts, and services. Most Tea Bagger objections seem to be based on spending money for the services sector. But which services are they talking about? the inspection of our food? the operation of our air lanes? the protection of our coasts? the provision of meals to disabled seniors? school lunches for the neediest children? the regulation of our businesses and the professional services we provide to one another? the inspectors who try to ensure that our houses don't collapse if we slam the front doors?

I would ask them to keep in mind that every onerous rule and regulation is there because someone cheated. It's like the TSA: we all pay the price for one idiot who tried to blow up an aircraft by lighting his shoe laces. There's a reason for them all and they may seem silly, but they exist because of us.

Which brings me to the purpose of this blog. If there is to be credible, careful pruning of our national investment in this country--and that's what government spending is, an investment--we need to pare the choices carefully with an eye to getting the most service for our money. 

Looked on this way, Planned Parenthood, for example, provides care to womem who otherwise lack medical services--cutting it out because it also provides abortions (less than 10% of what they do) is counterproductive because it costs relatively little, prevents expensive hospitalizations, and saves women's lives. The FAA makes possible the entire airtraffic lanes that crisscross the country and permit flights into and out of this nation. Why on earth would Congress want to have FAA officials working without pay right now and on their own time out of a sense of the importance of their work. Does Congress really want to see airtraffic shut down?

We need a Congress that wields a stiletto, not a sledgehammer.

And what have we got?  We have children throwing sand at one another and complaining that daddy hasn't come out to the sandbox to save them from one another.

Why on earth don't we go back to the work of the committee that previously prepared a series of proposed budget reductions. That work has been ignored. Why reinvent everything? Why don't we have some basic economic courses taught on Capitol Hill? Just because someone gets elected doesn't mean they have any sense. They've proved that.

I'm going to hope that the wiser, more experienced heads on Capitol Hill, people like Sherrod Brown of Ohio, can pound some sense into these others. Because when it comes to the budget, and as Shakespeare says, "We have scotch'd the snake, not killed it."