It may have seemed at the time like a political coup. Conservative lawmakers in the Republican Study Committee seized an opportunity, hosted a well-attended press conference, and laid out an aggressive budget-cutting agenda to help improve the government’s deteriorating budget outlook. They even came up with a clever little name: “Operation Offset.”
Under the circumstances, the frugal Republicans appeared “bold.” They’re willing to make “tough choices” that others are afraid of. They’re “taking the lead” in restoring fiscal sanity.
Of course, none of these things is true. As Kevin Drum noted, the proposed spending cuts are “mostly just a standard conservative wish list, and not a very serious one at that.” In a partisan sense, however, this is a debate the Dems should welcome. If offers an opportunity to lay out two competing visions of government.
This, in essence, is the right laying its cards on the table. There’s a massive deficit, hurricane relief and reconstruction efforts will be exceedingly expensive, and there’s at least talk about keeping the budget from spiraling completely out of control. The Republican Study Committee stepped up to explain what conservative Republicans think is the appropriate solution: slash Medicare and Medicaid; cut military quality-of-life programs, including health care; and rely on arithmetic mistakes to find savings that don’t exist.
Salon’s Tim Grieve summarized some of the other cuts nicely.
The Republicans would freeze funding for the Peace Corps, the Global AIDS Initiative, U.N. peacekeeping operations and a wide variety of third-world development programs; eliminate the EnergyStar program, eliminate grants to states and local communities for energy conservation, reduce federal subsidies for Amtrak, eliminate funding for new light-rail programs and cancel the president’s hydrogen fuel initiative; eliminate state grants for safe and drug-free schools because “studies show that schools are among the safest places in the country and relatively drug free”; and eliminate the teen funding portion of Title X, which provides “free and reduced-price contraceptives, including the IUD, the injection drug Depo-Provera, and the morning-after pill” to poor teenagers.
Along the way, they’d find a way to punish — or simply eliminate — some of their enemies, real and imagined. They’d cut funding for the District of Columbia, eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, eliminate subsidized student loans for graduate students, terminate the Legal Services Corporation, eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and kill the National Endowment for the Humanities.
To borrow an old conservative phrase, “there’s got to be a better way.”
This is the first real talk about “sacrifice” in a long while. The RSC’s report is effectively saying that everyone can’t have everything; some folks are going to have to get less. On this, we agree. The trick of it is, for the right, those folks are exclusively Americans who have less, at the expensive of those who have more. It is, to borrow another phrase, Robin Hood in reverse. Why ask millionaires to give up some of their tax breaks when we cut health care for families in poverty?
The left hasn’t had to do much about this debate this week — Republicans seem to be at each other’s throats, so there’s no real need for Dems to interfere — but it’s worth noting that there are viable alternatives (here and here, for example) to the RSC’s predictable plan.
Let’s give the public a chance to see the right’s vision for improving the budget vs. a progressive vision. Ultimately, I like our chances.