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The
Columbus Dispatch...
Who will lead?
President, Congress
still not dealing with looming fiscal crisis
Friday, February 18, 2011
The budget proposal President Barack Obama presented Monday is a
grossly inadequate response to the nation’s growing fiscal crisis.
It offers modest cuts, confined to a relatively tiny area of the
federal budget. Its projection of $1.1 trillion in savings over 10
years is ludicrous considering that the budget adds $1.6 trillion to
the national debt in just one year, and contributes to a projected debt
increase of $7.2 trillion by the end of the decade, raising the current
$14 trillion debt by 50 percent.
The proposed cuts - tinkering with home-heating assistance
and other nondefense, discretionary programs, the total of which make
up about an eighth of the budget - won’t begin to address the
accelerating debt burden, which has interest payments eating up a
bigger portion of the budget every year.
According to the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, which
advocates for a balanced budget, under the Obama plan, in 2012, 9.5
percent of federal revenues go to pay interest on the debt; by 2021,
interest costs would consume 17.1 percent. Interest payments would be
almost twice the amount spent on nonsecurity, discretionary programs.
The reason for the president’s failure to propose what’s
really necessary - significant changes to defense programs, Social
Security, Medicare and Medicaid and, probably, tax increases to boot -
is no mystery: No one likes those changes. Not Democrats, not
Republicans and certainly not the American public.
But Obama had at his disposal an unusual source of support
for meaningful cuts and tax changes: the recommendations of his own
bipartisan fiscal commission, which in December issued a
report calling for significant cuts in domestic and defense
spending, changes to the tax code and reforms to entitlement programs.
They’re the sort of tough medicine that can be prescribed only by
respected elder statesmen no longer seeking votes. The commission could
have served as political cover for the president to adopt the
recommendations.
But he didn’t use it. While he hasn’t rejected the
commission’s recommendations, he largely has left them out of this
budget proposal.
Still, Obama’s failure to lead is no different from that
of the presidents and congresses before him who similarly chose to
continue borrowing, to cover the spending programs or tax cuts they
wanted to bestow on voters, rather than telling the American people the
truth: The nation can’t afford all the government programs and services
its citizens have come to expect.
At this point, who contributed most to the nation’s fiscal
rot doesn’t matter. The nation desperately needs leaders in the White
House and Congress willing to impose the unprecedented sacrifice that
getting the debt under control will require.
If the president and the leadership of both parties would
agree to give each other political cover for a comprehensive fix, there
would be hope of solving this problem before the nation is plunged into
a fiscal crisis that would wreak havoc here and around the globe.
As in any democracy, though, the American people get the
leaders they deserve. All previous experience says the timid
politicians are right: If they tell the truth about the budget and
propose the cuts and tax increases required to fix it, they’ll pay for
it in the next election.
Leadership could come from the base, if the American
public begins to accept the need for change and people vote for
politicians who promise to bring it.
Read it in the Columbus Dispatch
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