By Jeffrey Meredith
Let me start off by saying that I have only voted for a Republican once. It was a county coroner. I figured, “Hey, these people are already dead – how much more damage could a Republican do?”
Outside of county coroners, I don’t vote for Republicans. People who are alive – and I’m not referring to unborn babies and those in a persistent vegetative state, who are very well served by their Republican representatives – have too much at stake.
With that said, I am not voting for Barack Obama. Why? Because he won’t solve our fiscal crisis any more than McCain will.
The last thing this country needs is a tax cut. Obama has vowed to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, apparently with the other 5 percent footing the bill. Good, raise taxes on those bastards. But raise taxes on the rest of us too. It is clear that this country needs more revenue – we should be raising taxes. (Note for Rudy and John: tax cuts are not going to increase revenues.) We need to be running true surpluses (not what we had during the Clinton years) in order to shrink the debt.
From MarketWatch: “Through the first 11 months of the fiscal year, the deficit was $483.4 billion, 76% higher than $274.4 billion a year ago, largely because of the weaker economy and higher spending on the war. The on-budget deficit has totaled $669.5 billion so far this year, up 56% from $427.8 billion at this time last year.”
The U.S. federal debt now checks in at roughly $9.7 trillion.
Now you may be saying, “Why should I care? Cheney said, ‘Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.'” Well, for one, Dick Cheney is full of it. And you should care because in FY 2006, the U.S. government spent $406 billion on interest payments to holders of the national debt. $406 billion! That’s more than 23 times the 2008 budget of NASA. Think of all the things we could do with that money.
I want to put this interest figure in perspective for you. Remember all the federal departments that the Republicans wanted to eliminate in 1996? They included the Department of Education ($59.2 billion in 2008), HUD ($35.2 billion), the Department of Energy ($25 billion requested in FY 09) and the Department of Commerce ($8.18 billion requested in FY 09). I obviously don’t have the numbers that Congress authorized department-by-department for a particular year, but let’s just imagine the Republicans had succeeded with their plans and denied us all the valuable services of these departments (although I certainly favor handing over HUD’s responsibilities to the states and localities . . . go ahead and abolish it) – these departments still represent less than $130 billion in spending and are less than one-third of what we are committing to interest payments. That’s how bad it is.
This should be the #1 issue in the campaign – the national debt and what we’re going to do about it. The debt was a huge issue in 1992 and it was about $4.4 trillion then; now it’s over $9.7 trillion and nobody seems to care.
The Iraq War cost was estimated at $435 million a day in early 2008. Stretch that figure out over a year and you’re looking at about $158.8 billion a year. Granted, the cost per day has skyrocketed – in March 2006, the CBO was telling us that the war cost $200 million a day. So we leaped from $200 million a day to $435 million a day within two years? Not even the surge can fully explain that type of dramatic increase. Even if the Iraq War’s price tag hit $200 billion a year, that’s still less than half of what we spent on interest on the debt in FY 06.
Which brings me to my first major criticism of Obama supporters: They pretend that the deficit will vanish as soon as our combat troops are withdrawn from Iraq (Mid-2010? 2011? I can’t keep up with the negotiations), even though the Iraq War is only part of the problem. And not all of that Iraq money will be freed up in 2012, 2013, etc. – you can bet that some money will be redirected to operations in Afghanistan and we will have non-combat troops remaining in Iraq, the so-called residual force. It’s not like $200 billion is suddenly going to fall into our lap and we’ll have a balanced budget. It wouldn’t happen that way, especially considering that we’re running deficits approaching $500 billion because of a weak economy.
The smallest Bush deficit I can recall was $163 billion in FY 07. Excluding the Social Security surplus, it would’ve been much worse, and by 2017, we won’t be looking at any Social Security surpluses.
Bottom line: getting out of Iraq does not bring us back to zero. We’re still running deficits even if you remove the Iraq War spending.
Congress, under both parties, has given no demonstration that it can reduce spending. Given that federal entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) eat up 40-45% of spending and are politically untouchable, and that the Democrats will be called pinko commies if they touch our bloated defense budget (about 20% of our spending), and that interest payments are eating up about 8-9 percent of spending . . . that leaves the universe of about 26-32% of federal spending that we can actually try to reduce right now.
So when you hear a politician say that he or she is a “fiscal conservative” who wants to reduce spending in Washington, the truth is that they can’t do much at all. He’s only dealing with that 26-32% universe; even when you cut funding for the super monkey collider or the Bridge to Nowhere, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference because the other 68-74% of spending is already spoken for. And if this “fiscal conservative” happens to be a hypocrite like Tom Coburn, you can ask him why he voted against limits on farm subsidies that are often directed to corporate-owned farms and millionaires. Fiscal conservative, my a$$. Only when it comes to denying the Justice Department a measly $10 million (overwhelmingly approved in the House) to investigate unsolved civil rights crimes. Tom Coburn, go back to delivering babies full-time because you’re an awful senator.
Given Congress’ inability to reduce spending (ideally we would slow down spending as much as possible), our only choice right now is to bring in more revenue and run surpluses to hammer away at the debt. It should be a national priority to stop paying billions and billions in interest.
I should note that it’s going to take much more than what we did during the late 90s. Even during the so-called surplus years of the Clinton administration, we were still running deficits.
You’ll notice a chart at that link showing how the public debt went down between FY 98 and FY 01, yet intergovernmental holdings went up even more. This can explain why the total national debt increased from just over $5.4 trillion to just over $5.8 trillion. Granted, a $400 billion increase over several years is better than a $400 billion increase in a single year (a la Bush), but it is a myth that we were truly reducing the national debt under Clinton. We were taking a step in the right direction, but we hadn’t gotten to our ultimate destination.
Rather than offering concrete proposals for debt reduction, Obama and McCain largely seem to be ignoring the issue. They’re more concerned with the meaning of quotes about pigs and lipstick. Also, did you know that Barack Obama was a community organizer of mixed race parentage and that John McCain was a POW? I couldn’t remember it until the 1,000th time they told me. These men are narcissistic, self-touting idiots. But I suppose that’s what running for president is all about. We deserve better candidates – these men are not the answer.
In reader letters, members of the public say that they want to hear about the issues. Well, this is the issue. One out of every 11 or 12 dollars is just being flushed down the toilet on interest. When I talk to likely voters, most of them are oblivious to the actual numbers. When I tell them this story, they’re horrified – and then they ask why a person with such a strong interest in politics is not voting. That’s when I tell them that Obama and McCain are absolute tools and we’re all doomed . . . so we might as well enjoy our lives as much as we can. I’m going to Glacier National Park in October and to Sedona in November; life goes on and it can be enjoyable, even as idiots seal the decline of America.
Brookings has some depressing projections in “Federal deficit soars, but McCain, Obama offer no answers” by the McClatchy Washington bureau: Obama adds $3.5 trillion to the debt and McCain adds $5 trillion. And I’m supposed to be happy with the argument that Obama causes less debt? It’s like walking through the door with a broken nose and telling your Mom, “Wait till you see the other guy.”
I was struck by the fact that Obama talked about the Iraqi government surplus while we were “wallowing” in deficits, yet he has no solution to our deficit problem. The best defense I can hear from Obama supporters is:”He can’t say that he’ll raise taxes because he’ll lose the election like Mondale.” So this is just an electoral tactic where he promises to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans and he doesn’t intend to do it? He’s secretly interested in addressing the debt? Sorry, I’m not buying it.
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This piece first appeared on Jeffrey Meredith’s blog Life in Allston, and comes to us via The May Report. Meredith is a former technology writer for Chicago’s iStreet and is now a student at the Boston University Center for Science and Medical Journalism.
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Also from Meredith: Additional figures regarding the debt.
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Posted on September 16, 2008