President Obama’s budget would make a start at reducing federal deficits over the next decade — but only a start.
He proposes cuts in the Pell Grant program, reductions in Pentagon spending made possible by the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and a five-year freeze in federal salaries, which was announced earlier.
Conspicuously missing are the proposals adopted by the president’s own deficit reduction panel calling for basic changes in Social Security, Medicare and tax reforms that would bring in more money, primarily by revamping such basic fixtures as the mortgage interest deduction.
Administration spokesmen point out that the Republicans on the panel all voted against the majority report. The president, they suggest, wants to wait to sign on to major reforms until there is at least some bipartisan support for them.
When the deficit crisis grows grave enough, they say, both parties will be forced to give up their ideological positions and hammer out compromises.
This super-cautious approach can be defended. While it is the president’s job to lead, part of leadership is being practical. The best plan in the world isn’t practical if the legislation can’t be passed. And it will be impossible to pass a bill calling for significant reforms in Medicare and Social Security without broad bipartisan agreement on the fundamentals.
The deficit reduction panel, for example, called for raising the Social Security retirement age and for charging the retired wealthy for part of the cost of their health care under Medicare. Such proposals are juicy targets for demagogues. Advanced by either party alone, they would almost certainly fail — and the votes cast for them would be used as ammunition in the next election.
Much the same can be said for any proposal bold enough to make a real difference. Be-cause the national debt is now so high and the budget is so far out of balance, changes in federal getting and spending patterns will have to be drastic to be effective. And because drastic changes in tax policy and federal programs will take money out of some voters’ pockets and cost other voters their jobs they will be mightily resisted.
To persuade the American people to accept the fiscal discipline it will take to put our government back in the black — as it was a mere 11 years ago — bipartisan agreement will be required.
AMERICANS CAN work together to achieve important goals, but the best example of that was the common cause the people made with each other in World War II. The threat the nation faces from today’s de facto bankruptcy is not so dramatic and physical as that poised by Hitler and Hirohito, but is perhaps as grave in many of its implications.
Allowed to grow, our fiscal folly will erode our nation’s ability to maintain its position in the world, will make it impossible to continue to provide health care and subsistence income for the retired, will mean the erosion of our transportation systems and assure the decay of our universities.
That’s just for starters: we’re not talking about the small stuff. The core of the United States is at risk. A truly national effort will be required to set things right again.
The only ideology appropriate to the challenge we face today came from Ben Franklin when he warned his fellow Americans at the signing of the Declaration of Independence that “we must all hang together, or, assuredly, we will hang separately.”
What America most needs now is togetherness in the halls of Congress.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
