That was dumb. Too dumb, even, for DeLay's friends and colleagues, who've managed to strike back with the even dumber theory that the federal budget contains not some waste but hundreds of billions of dollars of it. The Republican Study Committee, for example, a group of House conservatives who do a better job than their party's leadership of pretending to be interested in balanced budgets, launched Operation Offset, which claims to identify enough wasteful spending to cut $500 billion from the budget over the next 10 years. The relevant section of the committee's report, "Tough Choices in Tough Times" is, in fact, a case study in conservative cruelty and dishonesty.
Most notably, it partakes heavily of a much-beloved Republican tactic: using phase-ins to obscure what's really happening. In the first year, 78 percent of the cuts come from delaying the implementation of the scheduled Medicare prescription-drug benefit and rolling back earmarks attached to the recent highway bill. Both are genuinely wasteful, though neither is 100-percent waste, so both proposals look to be on a good path. Both, however, are one-time savings, not enduring elements of the budget. In year two of the plan, for example, 0 percent of the cuts come from those measures. In year three, it's also zero percent. Year four? Zero percent. You get the idea. By the time you look at the full 10-year picture, only about 10 percent of the cuts are coming from these wasteful endeavors. Almost half, meanwhile, is accounted for by the cryptic "Block Grant Medicaid Acute Services." What this means is that instead of providing an amount of money for emergency medical services equal to the amount necessary to provide acute services to everyone who's eligible, the government will appropriate too little and just let poor people not get treatment when they're sick.
Say what you will about the idea of making sure poor people get treatment when they fall ill, but this isn't "waste" by any standard definition. It's just something conservatives don't care about.
The Cato Institute came out with a similar list of proposed cuts in "wasteful" spending and pegged foreign aid for the chopping block on the grounds that it "doesn't work." This would be silly, were it not so dangerous. For one thing, even if aid didn't work, eliminating it would still wreak havoc with our foreign policy. For another thing, aid works just fine. That it doesn't is one of the most pernicious myths to have gained hold over a vast swath of the American public. Yes, some foreign-aid programs have failed, but others have succeeded. Virtually all of the economic success stories of the post-World War II era -- first Western Europe, then elements of the Pacific Rim, then Eastern Europe in the '90s -- have seen foreign aid play a role. In addition, foreign aid has wiped out smallpox, done wonders to mitigate the harm done by other infectious diseases, and is regularly deployed to halt famines. In short, it saves lives. Reducing mortality, meanwhile, turns out to be one effective way of boosting economic growth. Unfortunately, much of the good done by past humanitarian aid is being undone by the new scourge of AIDS and a resurgence in tuberculosis and malaria. We need more foreign aid, not less.
The moral of the story is that while the federal budget is certainly large, and while it would be easy enough to reduce its size, you can't make it much smaller by cutting waste. Overwhelmingly, our taxes go to pay for the military, to finance the national debt, to pay Social Security benefits, and to give health care to old people. Law enforcement, homeland security, regulatory enforcement, and the fight against poverty also play a large role. Some people don't think the government should do that stuff, but that's ideology, not waste. What's more, it's an ideology the public clearly and consistently rejects, which is why conservatives devote so much energy to pretending it's waste, rather than simply spending on reasonably effective programs whose goals they reject. Bruce Bartlett, who has emerged in recent years as perhaps the most sensible conservative economics commentator, recently offered a taste of what reality-based right-wingery might look like:
Therefore, like it or not, we must travel the same route taken by the Europeans, who long before us made peace with the welfare state and tried to figure out how to pay for it with the least negative impact on economic growth and incentives. They all imposed a broad-based consumption tax called the value-added tax as an add-on tax to all the others.This sort of thing -- deciding what the tax code should look like and how progressive it should be -- would be sensible for politicians to argue about. Having that debate, however, would require Republicans to stop pretending that they can just bring revenue ever lower and make up the resulting gap by slashing waste. Cutting effective, popular programs could do it, but GOP political strategists are too smart to eliminate those kinds of programs. Someday, maybe, more Republicans will think the way Bartlett does. Unfortunately, it may take a financial crisis to make that happen. Until then, expect the waste talk to continue.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
