Washington makes a mess – again

Best-laid plans can sometimes blow up

WASHINGTON — Once again, government economic engineering has produced a time bomb with a short fuse.

Back in 2011, few lawmakers, if any, thought deep and indiscriminate spending cuts, totaling about $85 billion and now starting to kick in, were a smart idea.

The across-the-board cuts, set up as a last-resort trigger and based on a mechanism used in the 1980s, are a reality largely because President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, failed to find a way to stop them.

Republicans, influenced by tea party and other conservative factions, insisted on just spending cuts to narrow the deficit. Tax increases were out.

Obama and the Democraticrun Senate didn’t budge from a mix of cuts and increased tax revenues.

“Arbitrary” and “stupid” Obama called the auto-pilot cuts, known as sequester.

But history shows a long trail of unintended consequences from government actions — or inaction:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, after a solid re-election victory in 1936, believed that the Great Depression was winding down. Unemployment was declining and economic activity was coming back.

Roosevelt and Congress believed it was time to cut freeflowing government spending and raise taxes. The Federal Reserve tightened its financial reins. But the fragile economy couldn’t withstand the blows. The Depression roared back, lasting until the 1940s when U.S. involvement in World War II finally revived the economy.

President Ronald Reagan’s ambitious 1986 overhaul of the tax code simplified taxes and closed many loopholes, including repealing the popular tax de- duction for credit-card interest. Then people started borrowing heavily against fast-rising equity in their homes; that interest still was deductible.

But the practice eventually helped put millions of homeowners under water on their mortgages when the housing bubble burst, contributing to the 20072009 recession.

The tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were first proposed by Texas Gov. George W. Bush as he campaigned for president in 2000. At the time, the economy was enjoying rare multi-year budget surpluses and government economists were pre- dicting surpluses well into the future. Bush told cheering audiences his tax cuts would return to taxpayers “what is rightfully yours.”

Those cuts long have outlived the surpluses, which vanished in Bush’s first year in office. Deficits returned with a vengeance and have grown ever since.

Social Security has become one of the most expensive federal programs ever. When it was created in the 1930s, the average life expectancy was about 65. Longer life expectancies and the coming retirements of millions of baby boomers have put enormous strains on Social Security, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.

And now the sequester.