In case you missed it, Dana Milbank had one of those stories yesterday that’s almost too-scary to contemplate. A sparsely-attended presentation at the Rayburn House Office Building, featuring researchers from opposite ends of the political spectrum, focused on the future of the American economy based on how things are going now. The picture they painted was more than just bleak.
While Washington plunged into a procedural fight over a pair of judicial nominees, Stuart Butler, head of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Isabel Sawhill, director of the left-leaning Brookings Institution’s economic studies program, sat down with Comptroller General David M. Walker to bemoan what they jointly called the budget “nightmare.”
There were no cameras, not a single microphone, and no evidence of a lawmaker or Bush administration official in the room — just some hungry congressional staffers and boxes of sandwiches from Corner Bakery. But what the three spoke about will have greater consequences than the current fuss over filibusters and Tom DeLay’s travel.
With startling unanimity, they agreed that without some combination of big tax increases and major cuts in Medicare, Social Security and most other spending, the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest rates that collapsed Argentina’s economy and caused riots in its streets a few years ago.
“The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay interest on massive and growing federal debt,” Walker said. “The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina.”
“All true,” Sawhill, a budget official in the Clinton administration, concurred.
“To do nothing,” Butler added, “would lead to deficits of the scale we’ve never seen in this country or any major in industrialized country. We’ve seen them in Argentina. That’s a chilling thought, but it would mean that.”
Butler, Sawhill, and Walker don’t agree on much, but they agree that we’re literally facing a looming fiscal catastrophe. The bottom-line, these experts agreed, was the need for some combination of spending cuts and tax increases.
And what’s the Republican agenda? Spending increases and tax cuts.
I seem to recall a time when there were grown-ups in charge of the government. It’s a shame they’ve been replaced by modern-day Neros.