Again, U.S. debt grows with no sign of a budget
Four years of piecemeal action hurt nation
WASHINGTON In America, budgeting is a blood sport.
The idea is to tie a noose around your opponent’s neck and at the next election hang him on the end of a 15-second TV clip that accuses him of jeopardizing your children’s future by voting for a $1.2-trillion deficit. So get rid of him.
In a congress that is more polarized than it has been since the Civil War, it’s almost impossible to agree on a budget.
No congressman will commit to a budget that farmers back in the home district in Kentucky will claim is ruinous.
Better to depend on so-called “continuing resolutions” that quietly fund the government program by program in a sort of sweeping but piecemeal fashion without committing to an overpowering global vision that can sink a politician’s career. These CRs have to be renewed every six months or so, sometimes quietly, sometimes in crisis. It all depends on political needs. Congress just renewed them again until September.
Four years have passed since the U.S Congress passed a budget and that was back when the Democrats controlled both houses. Unless there is what political scientists call a “punctuated equilibrium,” or big, boom event that suddenly unites the country, it’s doubtful Americans will see a budget any time soon, Jim Thurber, a professor of government and founder of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, said.
“The status quo will win,” he said. “I see us struggling slowly.”
It is fertile ground for politicians like Paul Ryan. As chairman of the House budget committee, Ryan is a blunt-edged Republican champion at the political budgeting game.
Earlier this month the Tea Party star announced a new budget that would cut $4.6 trillion in spending and essentially gut programs that give free health care to the poor and to seniors and defunded President Barack Obama’s treasured healthcare law of 2010 that is designed to lower health costs for the middle class.
Ryan’s budget re-introduces his voucher program for medicare rejected at the polls last November when he ran on the presidential ticket with Mitt Romney. Yet that vote has not altered Ryan’s vision.
“Did we win these arguments on the campaign, some of us think so,” he told reporters. Asked if his budget wouldn’t kill Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act, he replied: “It should.”
Republican House Speaker John Boehner told reporters the budget also approves construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which is odd given that final approval is in Obama’s hands and the project doesn’t rely on public financing.
The Republican-controlled House this week approved the Ryan budget in a vote that ran straight along party lines.
Meanwhile the Democrat-controlled Senate came out with a budget that would strengthen these programs while slowly reducing the deficit through increased tax revenue and reduced medical delivery costs by forcing companies to reduce profit margins. The U.S. has the highest medical costs in the industrialized world.
Ryan “wants to be president and he’s presenting budgets that he feels will appeal to the base of his party,” Thurber said. “He believes in them also. I don’t think that he’s being disingenuous that way.”
Once budgets are approved, they can be tough to change, he said. Sixty per cent are so-called entitlement programs such as medicare. The rest is locked in by long-term contracts and other commitments. Only about 10 per cent is flexible from year to year.
But does the lack of a budget matter?
“It’s certainly not that big a deal if there isn’t one,” Ethan Pollack, of the Economic Policy Institute, said. “But that doesn’t mean they are not important.”
Continuing resolutions will keep the government funded. What CRs lack, however, is a long-term, global vision.
U.S. budgets are a child of the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, which was designed to regain from the presidency congressional power over the budgetary process.
The act created the separate House and Senate budget committees. The idea was to come up with an annual budget that would guide spending. But today’s level of partisanship means each committee releases budget floaters that have no chance of approval.
Fiscal crises fill the void and there is no universal agreement on how to handle, among other things, America’s $17-trillion debt, which then continues to grow.