Kicking the Fiscal Grenade Down the Road

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Robert W. Merry 

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December 14, 2013

Chris Matthews of MSNBC was waxing indignant on Wednesday evening about the conservative Republicans who oppose the Paul Ryan-Patty Murray budget deal. He said they were engaged in a kind of “monster mash” display of stupidity and self-immolation. Of course he needn’t have wasted so much indignation on them, though he has plenty to spare, given that they were brushed aside in Thursday’s House vote on the budget deal.

But Matthews and other enflamed liberals must pummel the conservatives, even when this opposition contingent isn’t displaying much political clout, because they know their own hold on the political debate these days is tenuous, even with the leg-tingling Barack Obama in the White House—perhapsparticularly with the leg-tingling Obama in the White House. And they know further that these conservative Republicans—Rand Paul and Marco Rubio notable among them—are holding some big cards in the country’s ongoing fiscal debate.

The fact is, America’s long-term debt overhang probably represents its greatest national threat at this time. Any effort to address it will inevitably force a clamp on liberals’ cherished “entitlement” programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. These are popular programs throughout the land, and finding a way to trim them back as part of a long-term effort to address the country’s debt crisis won’t be easy. The time to do it would have been a generation ago, when very small adjustments in the entitlement formulas could have had a huge impact on these programs’ long-term fiscal health, and the country’s.

But that opportunity was lost, and now the problem is both more profound and more threatening. Chris Matthews and his fellow liberals don’t care. They’ll keep their heads buried in various prairie-dog holes in order to avoid seeing just how parched and desolate the fiscal landscape really is. And when they come up for air, they will chatter away, like prairie dogs, in denigration of those warning about the country’s accumulating debt.

But a reckoning is nigh, and those “monster mash” Republicans will be well positioned, when the crisis hits, to emerge as having been sound thinkers all along. Then they won’t be ignored.

In the meantime, they won’t hold sway, and rightly so, as Congress votes on what Wall Street Journal reporters Janet Hook and Kristina Peterson called a “craftsmanlike monument to the power of pragmatism.” The deal, they wrote, is based upon “a narrow slice of common ground” and designed largely to prevent another crisis surrounding another threat of a government shutdown. And while theNew York Times suggested that antideal Republicans, along with some opposition Democrats, were “raising the level of drama,” in reality there wasn’t much drama in a vote with an ordained outcome.

The Journal’s editorial page had it about right when it called the fiscal plan a “least bad budget deal” and noted that it included no tax increases or no new incentives for not working, but did include some modest entitlement reforms. It added: “Oh, and it will avoid another shutdown fiasco, assuming enough Republicans refuse to attempt suicide a second time.”