Bayh contemplates the problem of pork.
Senator Evan Bayh mounts the ramparts at the Wall Street Journal to argue in favor of cutting spending to control the debt. In so doing, he makes a wild prediction of "stagflation" if future policies continue, which is entirely too much. And his proposed solution?Efficiency and frugality, common virtues in the private sector, must be incorporated into government. Congress should enact health-care reform that actually lowers the deficit. For the next fiscal year, assuming the economy has gathered sufficient momentum, we should freeze domestic discretionary spending, limit increases in defense spending to the rate of inflation, forgo pay raises for federal workers, and institute a federal hiring freeze.There's a lot to unpack here. For starters, I'm not sure "frugality" is really the appropriate word to describe the private sector. And, sure, we should back health care reform to lower the deficit; it would be easier if you would support a public option, or any of the various revenue proposals that you've rejected, including making sure the charitable donations of the wealthy have the same tax benefits as those of the poor. Freezing domestic discretionary spending is insane during a recovery, as is freezing federal hiring -- that's the recipe for a double-dip recession. But it's easy to look at Bayh's record and see that this is merely posturing. Bayh voted on a bill to lower the estate tax on families with more than $7 million in wealth. Would fiscal responsiblity be supporting a $250 billion giveaway to wealthy families? Apparently, yes.Sure, there are spending problems in the federal budget, but Bayh doesn't take them seriously. He grumbles about earmarks, a tiny portion of the federal budget, but not about subsidies to student lenders or the agribussineses. He doesn't have much to say about raising taxes, even though that's the only way to really balance the budget. And though he does recognize that most of the debt is not the president's fault, he doesn't recognize that under the president's policy the deficits do get cut down, to the point at the end of seven years the deficits will only be interest payments, not government spending. But the best part is the blatant concern trolling. He argues in favor of a "progressive" government -- without mentioning what that would entail -- in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Both Bayh and his advisers know the slant of the WSJ op-ed page and its readers. They aren't looking to argue that progressives should be more responsible -- they're looking to increase the senator's burnish in the eyes of conservatives.
-- TIm Fernholz
