How to avoid economic devastation
President Barack Obama has signaled a willingness to search out spending cuts, gave an uplifting speech about getting along, and here is something flabbergasting: For his new chief of staff, he named a man who thinks the president has veered too far left, who disapproves of the health law and wants to open some doors.
All of this is good, very, very good.
Republicans took control of the House after the near-revolutionary 2010 election and actually found a way to honor the Constitution and pledge to do better by it. They outlined plans to repeal the health law and spoke boldly of a coming austerity.
All of this is also very good, but we all know it’s not enough. Both sides have to do much more.
That’s true in part because the $14 trillion national debt is fiscal terrorism on the march. To help understand this figure, econo-mists note it comes to $45,300 per person, and to point out what we are currently up against, one account tells us that it took 228 years to accumulate the first $7 trillion, just six years to double that and may take no more than a decade to double the amount again.
We’re talking economic devastation here, but as bad as the debt is, it is finally only a symptom of something worse – a gargantuan, virtually unlimited, increasingly totalitarian administrative-welfare state that has come to cover this land like a massive, suffocating blanket leaving no square inch untouched.
On top of what we already had – tens of thousands of pages of regulations – it’s reported we got another $26 billion worth of regulations just this past year and that we face massive new interventions in finance, health and carbon emissions.
After action on any number of aforementioned specifics, a big step in the curative process would be to move decisively on a plan forged largely by co-chairmen of an Obama-created deficit commission, former Republican Senator Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, a Democrat who served as chief of staff for President Clinton. If you are a liberal, you are going to hate half of it and if you are a conservative you are going to hate the other half, but it’s hard to imagine any significant advances without give and take.
Obviously, any enacted version would still differ from the original ideas, but enough should be retained to cut trillions in spending, simplify taxes, set actual boundaries on budgetary misbehavior and significantly address the entitlements of Social Security and Medicare. Some on both left and right say we can leave these programs alone. We can’t. They are at the heart of what could ruin us if Congress sits on its hands.
A second big step would be to reassert consent of the governed as vital to what we have been and can be, which means an end to overkill by a bureaucracy ruling major portions of our lives. As varied commentators note, Congress is forever passing bills so broad as to mean nothing much until agencies convert them to regulations that mean too much, such as liberty forsaken. A splendid answer some advise is to have congressional reviews of major new regulations before they can go into effect.
A third step would be to heed the calls of author Philip Howard and others who want sunset provisions attached to all existing laws, meaning that they would perish after a set number of years unless given a new lease on life by congressional vote. There are major difficulties in so extensive an undertaking, but it’s worth searching out answers when you consider the oppressive weight of new law after new law after new law with few old laws going away, no matter how onerous or foolish or expensive.
Is that the spirit of bipartisan negotiation knocking on the door? If so, and if the sides are more concerned about a special U.S. future than special outcomes in the 2012 elections, Congress and the White House just might find themselves focusing on a trinity of special opportunities.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.