Republicans Don’t Really Care About Reducing America’s Debt

Republicans Don’t Really Care About Reducing America’s Debt

by Peter Beinart at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/21/republicans-don-t-really-care-about-reducing-america-s-debt.html

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But there’s another reason, which gets less attention. Most Republicans aren’t really interested in reducing America’s debt. I know that sounds strange. After all, conservatives have spent the Obama era screaming that unless America reduces its debt, we’ll become Greece or Detroit or ancient Rome. Last week, some congressional Republicans found the prospect of raising the debt limit so horrifying that they were willing to risk a second financial crisis instead.


But ignore the rhetoric and watch what the GOP does between now and December. Last week, as part of the deal to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling, Congress gave budget negotiators roughly two months to agree on a deficit-reduction deal. Basically, the negotiators have three options. First is to replace the “sequester”—the automatic cuts to discretionary spending that kicked in last March—with cuts to long-term “entitlement” programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Second is to replace the sequester with both entitlement cuts and tax hikes. Third is to do nothing and let the sequester continue.


Republicans prefer the first option, but they can’t achieve it as long Obama remains president. He has said a thousand times that he won’t support a deficit deal that cuts entitlement spending alone, and as Republicans recently learned the hard way, Obama can’t be rolled. So the GOP’s real choice comes down to the latter two options.


If Republicans were really interested in slashing debt, they’d choose the second option in the blink of an eye, as cutting entitlements and raising taxes are a much, much better way to cut the deficit than continuing the sequester. For starters, many of the discretionary programs the sequester slashes partially pay for themselves. Last year the nation’s air traffic control system, for instance, paid for 70 percent of its own budget through user fees on airline passengers. Such fees also fund a significant chunk of the budgets of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Food Safety Inspection Service, Food and Drug Administration, National Park Service, and many other government agencies. That means when the sequester prunes these agencies’ budgets by one dollar, the government saves far less than one dollar, as those cuts also prevent the agencies from collecting the user fees that bring money in.



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