It’s been a frustrating couple of weeks for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.). As ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, he’s had to sit through hours of testimony and listen to endless amounts of spin regarding President Obama’s 2012 budget. And it’s not so much the president’s lack of leadership on an issue of such great exigency -- deficit reduction -- that Sessions finds most galling. It’s the fact that Obama and his deputies are trying to pull a fast one on the public.
“He didn’t lead, but worse than that, he falsely told the American people, ‘If you pass my budget, we’ll start living within our means and start paying down the debt,’” Sessions tells National Review Online. “We need to call on the president to be honest with the American people.”
#ad#Sessions is referring to comments the president made at a televised news conference, and again during his weekly radio address, last week. In both instances, Obama assured the American people that under his budget proposal, “we will not be adding more to the national debt.”
“What world are we living in?” Sessions asked recently during a speech on the Senate floor. What kind of “fantastical accounting” was the White House engaging in?
In the real world, Obama’s budget increases -- in fact, almost doubles -- the national debt from $14 trillion to $26.3 trillion over the next decade, according to the Office of Management and Budget. It includes almost $9 trillion in new spending, and has a total price tag of $46 trillion, over that same period. At no point in the ten-year window does the federal government come close to balancing its budget. The closest it ever gets is a budget deficit of $600 billion. And that’s before you take into account the fanciful nature of the administration’s projections regarding growth and interest rates.
This massive discrepancy between rhetoric and reality prompted Sessions to ask Office of Management and Budget director Jacob Lew, during his appearance before the budget committee, whether the president knew what was in his own budget. When Sessions pressed Lew further on the issue of whether Obama’s plan adds to the debt, the OMB director suggested they agree to disagree. This is where Sessions’s patience ran out. “I can’t respect a position that suggests this budget reduces the debt; if you take that position, we’re talking beyond each other,” he told Lew sternly. “I don’t think it’s a matter of opinion.”
It’s only a matter of opinion if you reside in a realm of pure fantasy, where avant-garde economic concepts such as “primary balance” -- the idea that interest payments on the national debt (about $200 billion this year, projected to be $844 billion ten years from now) don’t really count toward the overall deficit -- are used to justify increased spending; where lawmakers can “cut” federal spending simply by not increasing it; where the primary drivers of our debt can be ignored indefinitely. In short: Only in Washington, D.C. could Obama’s budget be considered a fiscally sincere document.
Indeed, the conventional wisdom among Beltway types is that the White House budget is purely political in scope, an opening bid in what is sure to be a prolonged and messy negotiation process between the Republican House and Democratic Senate. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner all but admitted as much in response to a question from Sessions during a budget hearing. “With the president’s plan, even if Congress were to enact it, and even if Congress were to hold to it, we would still be left with a very large interest burden and unsustainable obligations over time,” he said. “That’s why we’re having the debate.”
All the more reason the public should be outraged, Sessions says. The president’s budget should not be mere rhetorical fodder in an abstract debate. It ought to be, by even the most meager standards, a document that could be put into effect without placing the country on a path to bankruptcy. “That is not a way to begin the dialogue we need to be having,” Sessions says.
#page#Nonetheless, Sessions is confident the American people understand the seriousness of the situation. “They spoke with crystal clarity in November,” he says. “Democrats are in denial, and there are even some Republicans who don’t fully get it, but the American people do.” And where the president has failed to lead on deficit reduction, the GOP now has a chance to rise to the occasion, particularly in the area of entitlement reform. Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.), the Budget Committee’s chairman and a member of the president’s bipartisan deficit commission, could be a critical ally in that effort.
In his role as ranking Republican on the committee, Sessions is determined to use every opportunity to highlight the seriousness of nation’s fiscal problems. “We need to stop and get off this road to the abyss. We can’t just slow down from 90 mph to 60 mph; we need to have a complete change of direction.” He’ll also seek to expose and combat the myriad muddied facts and Democratic spin that cloud the debate. Sessions has already begun to accumulate a library of entertaining YouTube clips from budget hearings in which Lew, Geithner, and other administration officials struggle to answer his basic questions and defend Obama’s plan from, well, reality.
#ad#The Budget Committee will continue to hear from White House officials in the coming weeks. Sessions will continue to ask the tough questions, with the simple goal of trying to bring the national budget debate “in sync with reality.” He realizes that Senate Republicans are the minority, but says that won’t stop them from fighting for fiscal sanity on every front.
“We are going to fight for spending cuts this week, next week, next month, and next year,” he says. “We are going to fight for spending cuts in the Budget Committee, in the Appropriations Committee, and on the Senate floor.”
The Senate recently voted to cut $4 billion as part of a two-week “stop-gap” resolution to keep the government funded while a longer-term is negotiated. Sessions thinks the long-term plan passed in the House ($61 billion in cuts over seven months) is a perfectly reasonable place to start.
“We’re spending $1.65 trillion [more than we take in] a year, so to say we can’t cut $61 billion is in itself an utterly unrealistic position,” Sessions says. To put that $61 billion figure in perspective, it represents just 1.7 percent of total federal spending this year. Since Obama took office, federal spending has increased by 24 percent -- 84 percent when stimulus funding is included. Spending as a percentage of GDP has risen from about 18 percent to more than 25 percent, an increase of almost 40 percent.
These figures point to yet another example of Obama’s budget gimmickry. The president promises to “save” $400 billion through a five-year spending freeze, effectively locking in these already bloated levels. To paraphrase former Bush strategist Ed Gillespie, that’s like gaining 24 pounds over Christmas and making a New Year’s resolution not to gain any more.
With the introduction of such inane concepts as “sustainable deficits” and “rhetorical” budgets into the political discourse, Sessions laments that we are dealing with a president who operates under a “post-modern, through-the-looking-glass theory of presidential leadership.” For a nation struggling to avert a debt crisis, actual leadership (and some honesty) is what’s required. That’s what Sessions is trying to provide.
--- Andrew Stiles is a 2011 Franklin Fellow.
Read More... [Source: No Title]
No comments:
Post a Comment