The Oval Office has released a budget. It's not balanced, but at least it's done that.
The Republicans have not.
Nonetheless, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, in an effort to pitch to the base on why holding the debt ceiling hostage is a good idea, is busy spouting off on Twitter.
And hence one of the major problems with American politics.
It's packed with liars and deceivers.
And, apparently, people who can't grasp an analogy.
Let's start there. Here's one McCarthy put out this past week:
Kevin McCarthy@SpeakerMcCarthy Apr 21
If you gave your child a credit card and they kept maxing it out, you wouldn’t blindly raise their limit—you’d help them change their behavior and figure out where to cut back on their spending.
The approach to our national debt should be no different.
First of all, for that analogy to make sense, the Executive branch would have to be a kid and Congress the parent, which is a weird analogy to start with. It's make a lot more sense to view the two coequal branches of government as spouses.
Indeed, for this analogy, it really would.
Looked at that way, the spouse who does the family budget is looking at the credit card the family uses and debating, and that is what Congress is debating, not paying the credit card bill.
Go ahead and try that, Kevin. Rack up a huge credit card debt, declare yourself fiscally irresponsible, and see if that means your budgetary problem magically gets better.
Of course, he doesn't think it will, which makes this more like an enraged drunken husband yelling at his wife that if she doesn't quit spending on shoes, he's going to let the house's household income go down the tubes, and probably beat her black and blue, while the child, in this case the American public, stands by and watches in horror. All why he racks up credit card debt for sporting goods or something.
That's abhorrent.
But that's the real analogy.
Some budget basics which serve, sadly, to point out that we're dealing with liars and deceivers.
Balancing the budget and starting to pay down the debt is perfectly possible. Here's how you do it.
1. Decide what the Federal Government really needs to do for us.
The dirty little secret of the Federal Budget, or one of them, is that people like it when somebody like McCarthy says we need to cut expenditures, until they realize the expenditures he's going to cut are the ones they really like.
Then they hate it.
School lunches? Local problem.
Bad bridges? Local problem.
Highways? Local problem.
Department of Defense? Way too big.
Entitlement? Let's not even go there.
Now that list probably makes people gasp, or some people gasp. That's because like it or not, 100% of Americans have some things that they like the Federal Government doing that aren't really the Federal government's job, and where they are the Federal Government's job, they don't want the Government doing less of the job.
And that's the dirty secret of what the Republicans tried to do here. They knew that many such things were popular with the public, and years ago they adopted the strategy that if they cut taxes as much as possible, only the absolutely necessary things would be paid for, and the rest would whither and die. Starve the government of money, the thought went, and programs will die all on their own, and we'd return to the mythical golden age of fiscal Nirvana.
The problem with that strategy was that it was idiotic and anti-historical.
Apparently the Tea Party, Club For Growth folks didn't relieve that if they were budgeted for, the Government would just borrow the money.
Indeed, it had no other choice. Things are budgeted for, it can borrow, so it has to.
D'uh.
So unless you pass a law that precludes the government from borrowing, all the crap about lower taxes is just that, a steaming pile. No tax money? The Federal Government will borrow. It actually must under those circumstances.
So here's the first chore. What do we really want the Federal Government to do?
Contrary to what the GOP likes to say, the Federal Government has been involved in the economy since the beginning of the 19th Century. As the Senate's website notes:
Henry Clay's "American System," devised in the burst of nationalism that followed the War of 1812, remains one of the most historically significant examples of a government-sponsored program to harmonize and balance the nation's agriculture, commerce, and industry. This "System" consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop profitable markets for agriculture. Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands. Clay argued that a vigorously maintained system of sectional economic interdependence would eliminate the chance of renewed subservience to the free-trade, laissez-faire "British System."
OH MY GOSH!
Subsidizing things to avoid subservience to free trade?
Pack of dirty Communists!
Well, whatever. That's the system we've had now for 200 years. Apparently, all those folks who want to "Make America Great Again" skipped history.
But that doesn't mean we need to pay for everything we currently do.
We need to keep paying for things we've promised and people rely on. Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, Veteran's benefits, etc. People rely on them. If we didn't want people to rely on them, we shouldn't have created a system they'd immediately come to rely on.
Which is, I'd note, why the concept of a Universal Basic Income is insane.
We need to decide if we want to pay for other things. Do we continue to subsidize, for example, the highway system at a national level, or pass that on to the states?
As part of the latter, we need to decide what part of the system can pay for themselves. Some things, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and its programs, already do. Maybe the Park Service can. Highway systems certainly can. Those would involve excises and user fees. So be it.
And there are a lot of things that the Federal Government really doesn't need to do. Free and reduced lunch programs it doesn't need to do. The National Labor Relations Board has overgrown itself.
But after we do all of that, the budget still won't balance, and that's because of the Defense Department and entitlements.
They're most of the budget.
2. Raise the cash
Using the family analogy again, our Federal parents are like two well-educated people who have intentionally taken part-time jobs, so they can spend the rest of the day blogging from the basement while day drinking. They need to get out of the house and get real jobs.
Which is to say, they need to raise taxes.
There is no way to balance the budget without raising taxes, and anyone who claims that there is, is lying. That's where guys like Kevin McCarthy are completely full of bullshit. He knows that he can't cut his way out of the deficit unless he's going to wipe out entitlements and have a military of three men and a Boy Scout.
American taxes have to be raised. At the very upper wealth category and corporate category, there's plenty of room for it.
And at the tariff level there is too. Tariffs have had a bad name ever since the Great Depression, but that was before everything we bought came in through the Port of Los Angeles from China. If we put on stout tariffs now, reflecting the added cost to American industry for environmental and labor laws, it would not only raise a lot of money, but encourage the rebirth of American industry as well.
3. Create a Liars Penalty.
This, I admit, simply won't happen.
Republicans know that if you admit you have to raise taxes, some semi employed fool wearing a MAGA hat is going to yell at you, even though his taxes aren't going to be raised. But the GOP is beholden to interest that are tax hostile.
Democrats know that not only will they get yelled at if they cut school lunches, but that guys like Robert Reich and Bernie Sanders cry if the Federal Government won't pay for free plates of kibble for stray cats.
So they'd rather cash their checks while things go down the tubes and post crap on Twitter.
Maybe a balanced budget Constitutional Amendment is a necessity.
While it's a pipe dream, what I'd like to see is a provision that nobody in Congress got paid if the budget wasn't balanced. There's a cut we can all get behind. And, if not balanced, their personal assets and property is attached for the debt forever for that year.
I'd bet that we'd have balanced budgets.
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