Why spending continues

— The most distinctive part of the last-minute deal to avert the “fiscal cliff” wasn’t that it made our debt problem worse (although it did). No, it was that hardly anyone seemed to care that it made our debt problem worse.

Some estimates from the Congressional Budget Office: The tax increases on the wealthy that President Barack Obama insisted upon will raise just $62 billion a year, which is equivalent to funding about two weeks of federal government costs. But even that modest revenue enhancement will be canceled out and then some by $330 billion in new spending.

There was also a measly $2 billion in cuts for existing programs for fiscal 2013, a “savings” which, as Mark Steyn noted, meant that our political leadership engaged in two months of negotiations in order to come up with an amount the government borrows roughly every 10 hours. As he put it, this was like “driving to a supermarket three states away to save a nickel on your grocery bill.”

Any movie script featuring such imbecility at the highest levels of government would be instantly rejected by Hollywood as beyond belief. Yet beyond belief is precisely where we find ourselves after the deal-even worse off than before, and with dwindling prospects for any course correction before the abyss.

This surreal outcome can be traced to three factors.

First, that the president we elected to a second term by 100-plus electoral votes just two months ago doesn’t care at all about the approaching fiscal catastrophe; indeed, he has never bothered to explain how his tax increases will actually make a difference vis-à-vis the debt, or why he refuses to contemplate steps that would make a difference (serious spending reductions and/or entitlement reform).

Obama was said by giddy liberals to have won the fiscal-cliff negotiations because he avoided having to make any real cuts, which tells you everything you need to know about the state of political liberalism as it further disconnects from fiscal reality. Victory for the left increasingly means keeping the spending spigot turned on full, even when the money is gone.

George W. Bush is often (with justification) blamed for piling up massive deficits, but one wonders how many people know that Bush’s biggest was only half of Obama’s smallest? Or that while Bush added more to the federal debt than almost all of his predecessors combined, Obama added more in just his first three years than Bush did in eight?

The second factor is that our media watchdogs don’t seem to care that Obama doesn’t care. Following the media’s coverage of the recent negotiations one would never know that there was a real fiscal cliff looming ahead, or learn anything about any of the numbers and causes propelling us toward it. In short, the media won’t talk about anything that Obama doesn’t want to talk about, and since Obama doesn’t want to talk at all about deficits and debt, the media won’t inform the public as to what we’re heading toward either.

Of course, the reason Obama doesn’t want to talk about deficits and debt, and the reason the media lets him get away with it, is because to do so would be devastating to their shared agenda of making government bigger; to the rationale for existence of political liberalism itself. A symbiotic Obama-media relationship has therefore developed which produces a tacit agreement to continue business as usual, even as the national debt soars past the gross domestic product and a fiscal-cliff deal adds another third of a trillion to it.

A final and necessary part of this conspiracy of silence involves the discrediting and demonization of anyone warning of looming disaster.

From the start of the fiscal-cliff negotiations the Republican/conservative side has been depicted as the extremist side, as if the idea of reining in runaway government spending at a time of massive deficits is somehow radical and the idea of keeping up the spending is the essence of moderation and reasonableness.

Those who argue that we can’t keep spending ever more money that we don’t have are said to be in the thrall of Koch brothers-financed ideology, while the peculiar ideology on the other side that pretends the deficits and debt don’t exist is never identified as such. Down becomes up, up becomes down, and we can never run out of money.

Thus, in the end, we can only have gotten to where we are through a gradual alteration of our language of politics-uttering phrases like “we can’t afford it” (even if we can’t) and asking questions like “where’s the money going to come from” will only get you identified these days as some kind of fringe Tea Partying wingnut.

The concept of political correctness has now been applied to budgetary matters, and the skunks at the picnic have become the guys who believe in what used to be called “fiscal responsibility.” And no one wants to be one of those guys.

So let’s all just close our eyes, plug our ears and repeat over and over again: “There is no debt, and deficits don’t matter.” The next generation will be so grateful.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 11 on 01/14/2013

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