The deal reached this past week between Senate Budget Committee chair Patty Murray and her House counterpart, Paul Ryan, is being hailed by all of the supposedly sensible voices in the DC political and press establishment as an example of bipartisan sanity, of the truly great things that can happen when Democrats and Republicans work together.
Well, there's what they say, and then there's the truth. Turns out that you don't have to think it's wonderful to vote for it or, for that matter, encourage your fellow House members to vote for it. You can, in fact, vote for it while you're vomiting over it. Or, in the immortal words of House Minority Leader (and, hopefully, soon-to-be-Speaker-again) Nancy Pelosi, you can "embrace the suck."
True, this budget leaves entitlements untouched, and true, it restores a portion of the sequester cuts. But it ratifies the GOP's no-new-taxes philosophy, while achieving deficit reduction on the backs of career civil service employees--the latter being supposedly acceptable, because they're so grotesquely "overpaid."
Let's start with the latter "point," and call it what it is.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Public employees are not overpaid. In fact, in may cases, they are grotesquely underpaid for the responsibilities they are frequently required to face. The truth of the matter is that they earn the salary and benefits they get. For that matter, so do the rest of us. There's more than enough money in our economy to pay everyone the salaries and benefits that public employees can and should get, and everyone would benefit from the spending that would result if everyone were paid that well. For an excellent summary of why this is true, take a look here.
As for the "revenue raisers" in the deal, they consist of those old Republican standbys: asset sales and user fee increases. At this rate, we're going to run out of assets to sell, and run out of users to make the fee increases work. In fact, those increases could be thousands of times the average annual per-person income of the users, and it still wouldn't even come close to balancing the budget. Oh, and like it or not, Republicans? A fee increase is no different from what must people call "taxes." Here in Maryland, we (briefly, thankfully) had a Republican governor named Bob Ehrlich who tried to play that game, and no one was fooled by it. Republicans do this because anti-tax politics is the only thing that gives their party a pulse. But they are running out of time in which to fool people with tactics like that; the rest of us are catching up to them.
And, on top of all of this, they still want to cut unemployment benefits and food stamps. If Democrats roll over on those issues, they might as well raise the white flag now for 2014.
If it really means deals like this one, then to hell with bipartisanship. Let the reporters who love it so much take a few of those cuts themselves, and see how swell they think they are when they're on the receiving end of them. Haven't the many give enough to the few already? Haven't they given more than enough? At what point do we stop pretending that splitting the political difference does not mean the same thing as sharing the burdens of making our country work?
Those aren't rhetorical questions. The answer to each of the first two is "Hell, yes!" The answer to the third one, as far as I'm concerned, is that we should have reached it by now. And the fact that we haven't makes me wonder if we'll ever reach it. Or if we'll reach it in time to save ourselves from our own greed and stupidity.
No comments:
Post a Comment