The supercommittee of Republicans and Democrats has failed to come up with ways to reduce the federal budget deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. Even though $1.2 trillion dollars seems like a lot, it pales in comparison to the whopping accumulated national debt of $15 trillion, which is dragging the economy into sluggishness and possibly even a second recession. But believe it or not, the supercommittee’s failure is good news — or at least better news than what it would have produced had an agreement been reached between the two big-government parties.
As negotiations within the supercommittee were shaping up, both Republicans, usually hypocritical on tax and budget issues, and Democrats, more honest but shameless, were advocating deficit-reduction packages that would have included tax increases. When Congress chartered the supercommittee, it said that if the panel could not reach $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction or Congress or the president rejected its package, an unpopular decision rule would be invoked — across-the-board budget cuts of the same amount would take effect in 2013. Granted, the $1.2 trillion in budget cuts is still small, across-the-board cuts are not so across-the-board because most domestic entitlement programs are omitted, and time still exists before 2013 arrives, thus permitting congressional evasion of the decision rule. Still, the rule laudably only cuts spending and avoids tax increases.
Such automatic cuts rankle the welfare queens of both parties. On the left, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine, has recklessly argued that no budgetary crisis exists — only an employment crisis. Of course, believing in Keynesian economics allows her to advocate the continued piling up of debt, which is already at staggering levels, in order for the government to give people make-believe, make-work jobs in the short term while dragging the economy for years to come.
Cutting another $500 billion or so from the defense budget over 10 years, added to the $450 billion already cut during the same period, would still amount to only about 15 percent of the annual defense budget. Because the defense budget has ballooned more than 50 percent since 9/11, a cut of such magnitude should be not threaten national security. The budget to defend the United States — a fairly intrinsically secure country with vast oceans as moats, weak and friendly neighbors, and nuclear weapons to deter any unlikely conventional attack — doesn’t require spending what the next dozen or so countries combined spend on security.
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