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| Why the Republican National Debt is $12 Trillion |
post-gazette | OK, the beast is starving. Now what? That's the question confronting
Republicans. But they're refusing to answer, or even to engage in any
serious discussion about what to do.
For readers who don't know what I'm talking about: Ever since Ronald
Reagan, the GOP has been run by people who want a much smaller
government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist,
conservatives want to get the government "down to the size where we can
drown it in the bathtub."
But there has always been a political problem with this agenda.
Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that
actually dominate federal spending -- Medicare, Medicaid and Social
Security -- are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to
accept large spending cuts?
The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be
dubbed "starving the beast" during the Reagan years. The idea --
propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan
Greenspan to Irving Kristol -- was basically that sympathetic
politicians should engage in a game of bait-and-switch. Rather than
proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through
popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the
government's fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a
necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an
unsustainable budget deficit.
And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year's budget
deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed
revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the
damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply
in the red, largely as a result of George W. Bush-era tax cuts and
unfunded wars. In addition, the combination of an aging population and
rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive
debt growth after 2020.
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