“I’LL GLADLY PAY YOU TOMORROW FOR A HAMBURGER TODAY.”

9/9/11

Just a few weeks ago, all the talk among the Washington punditry and “public service” community was of cutting spending, getting the budget under control, and reducing deficits. The Republicans, to their credit, used the crude and curious tool of the debt limit to forge something of a plan to address the profligacy that has characterized Washington for just about as long as anyone can remember but that has become especially acute since the Bush/Obama administration came to power in 2000. Yes, sir, we were told, we were going to change our evil, spendthrift ways; if we didn’t the country was going to go broke.

So what happened last night? President Obama proposed $447 billion in new spending in order to “get America back to work,” or some such nonsense. Yes, I know more than half of that pile was composed of reductions in the payroll tax, but a targeted tax reduction is little more than a spending cut in disguise. But let’s assume that those cuts in payroll taxes are genuine tax cuts; then the spending increases amount to “only” $202 billion. And even those tax cuts add to the deficit that we were told will drive us to poor house. The President assured us, however, that the deficit reduction committee, charged with finding an additional $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction (See my 8/2/11 post HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF SMELL, SIR?), which so far has met only once and has found $0 (zero) of deficit reductions will be instructed, or at least encouraged, to find another $447 billion or so in future cuts to negate the long run fiscal consequences of the spending spree he is proposing for the present.

Speaking of that phony baloney deficit reduction panel, one of its member, Senator John Kyl a Republican who nominally represents Arizona but in reality represents the military industrial complex about which perhaps the greatest president of many of our lifetimes, Dwight Eisenhower, warned us, has said he will quit the panel if it proposes further reductions in “defense” spending. Senator Kyl thus takes 22% of the budget off the table, and that’s before addressing any of the entitlements that are the real fiscal time bomb. Good luck with that deficit reduction thing, esteemed panel members.

The general silliness taking place in Washington merely reinforces a point that I have been making for years but made especially vociferously over lunch with a trusted friend and confidante earlier this week: The poltroons that we have sent to Washington cannot possibly operate in an environment that requires penuriousness with the public purse. The politicasters who populate the city on the banks of the Potomac see their role in life as giving your money to people who can propel them on the flight of self-aggrandizement that characterizes their existence; i.e., they are using your money to buy power and perpetual panegyrics for themselves. Saving money would involve denying such larder to the people who can make their dreams of fulfilling their dual narcissistic/messianic dreams come true. Does that make any sense to them, especially since it isn’t their money? So why should they make any effort to save your money? Even these dolts can see the pointlessness, indeed, the counterproductivity, of such pursuits.