Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty must have felt a sense of vindication last night on Fox News when, mentioning his op-ed in the Daily Caller, he was asked about President Obama’s proposal for a three year budget freeze. Obama’s proposal would affect non-security discretionary spending beginning with the 2011 budget, which would be higher than that of 2010, but then remain frozen until the end of 2013.
Pawlenty’s reaction?
“It’s kind of like somebody eating three Big Macs and then deciding they are going to control their weight by ordering a Diet Coke.”
First, that’s a pretty good line. Pawlenty could use more lines like this; it might ameliorate his “boring” problem.
Second, he’s right. Freezing non-defense discretionary spending, which the CBO projected to grow by $35 billion in the next five years, will accomplish almost nothing meaningful, especially in the wake of bank bailouts and a stimulus package recently estimated to total $826 billion. Federal tax rates are currently at a 60-year low, while spending is at a 60-year high and still climbing. To tackle the budget deficit in any meaningful sense, something has to give – something more significant than freezing a small part of the skyrocketing federal spending.
Pawlenty then, true to form, pressed forward, asserting that what we need is not to freeze spending; we need to cut it, and then pass a balanced-budget amendment to the constitution. I’m still highly skeptical that his constitutional amendment idea is going to pay the political dividends he must be banking on; that point aside, Pawlenty is on the right turf here. He is not afraid to talk about the real 900-pound-gorilla in the room, the $65 trillion in unfunded entitlement liabilities, which if not dealt with – soon – will sink our fiscal ship.
Public anxiety about budget deficits will continue to grow, perhaps even more rapidly, when unemployment begins to subside and families are less concerned about making ends meet. If things play out this way, Pawlenty will be in a good spot; however, my hope is that he has something more realistic than a constitutional amendment to offer when the time comes.
2 responses so far
1 sinz54 // Jan 27, 2010 at 7:35 pm
The problem with all these budget-balancing proposals, whether by Amendment or by a bipartisan commission, is that liberals won’t accept spending cuts and conservatives won’t accept tax increases.
I’ll bet that those conservatives on RedState.com, if given a choice between Federal deficits and a Federal budget balanced by tax increases, would prefer the former to the latter.
Balanced budgets are a red herring anyway. What most conservatives really want is a smaller government with a smaller budget, not a government of huge size with a balanced budget.
2 canadianmoderate // Jan 27, 2010 at 11:26 pm
But one thing Republicans want more than anything, as I found out over last summer and fall, is to keep Medicare exactly the way it is. They are either going to have to do a complete 180 on Medicare and upset the senior voting base, or keep up defending Medicare the way they’ve been doing (which I imagine they’ll do). It’s true that non-defense discretionary spending isn’t much, but neither is non-entitlement discretionary, and I can’t see the GOP talking about entitlement spending (well, maybe food stamps). It still doesn’t get at the problem that is the unfunded liabilities. And Pawlenty isn’t going to touch a tax increase with a ten-foot pole to help the budget issues. I hope you Americans figure it out. The Canadian economy depends on it too. Voting against even talking about the realities of US fiscal health in a budget commission isn’t a good start, in my opinion.
You must log in to post a comment.