The vast majority of Americans are angry at Washington’s excessive spending. Yet conservatives seeking to control that spending can still lose the public’s support.
In particular, maneuvers over raising the ceiling on federal debt offer only limited opportunities for success and high risks — for the country and conservatives alike.
As the recent House battle over this year’s funding shows, better chances are coming — and will keep coming and coming in Washington’s normal funding process.
Without question, federal spending has grown excessively: Uncle Sam now consumes almost a quarter of everything America makes — the government’s highest intrusion on the economy since 1946. For this reason, the federal deficit is at the highest peacetime level relative to GDP in history — 10 percent in 2009 and 8.9 percent in 2010. And the ratio of total federal debt to the economy has increased 50 percent in two years.
The problem with all this spending is, it’s already taken place — and left us with the need to raise the debt limit.
Several sincere fiscal conservatives argue that it would be wrong to increase that ceiling without tying it to significant cuts in future spending. But, as tantalizing as the connection is, that strategy can’t gain much — and could lose plenty.
In the worst-case scenario, failure to raise the debt limit triggers default — a move that would make the 2008-09 financial crisis look like a bump in the road. More important, the mere prospect of default could be enough to spook already rattled financial markets. (Bankruptcy or even its threat looks the same in governments as in corporations.)
Confidence won’t take nearly as long to be shaken a second time either, especially if the quake could be much larger on the economic Richter scale than the last one. It also would be coming at a time when America’s economic predominance is in greatest doubt in the last 100 years.
Obviously, no one in American politics wants this to happen. But any debt-ceiling battle means a game of chicken, with disaster coming at some point as long as neither side blinks.
And it’s impossible to know in advance just where that point lies. Literally, we do not know what the market will bear.
The political conditions can be as uncertain as the economic ones. In the runup to such a confrontation, members of Congress can lock themselves into positions from which they can’t or won’t (or both) extract themselves. The government’s current partisan split, with a Republican House but Democratic Senate and White House, only exacerbates uncertainty and reduces flexibility in such a crisis.
None of this means conservatives shouldn’t seriously undertake their pilgrimage to end profligacy. They must. And the debt-limit debate can speed that journey. But a mistake in that fight could do irreparable economic and political harm — and do so sooner than anyone can predict.
By contrast, Washington’s annual funding bills offer the opposite mix of risks and benefits: The worst-case scenario is far less grave, and the potential rewards much greater.
These bills are the real targets anyway, the ones directly controlling Washington’s future spending. Why use the debt limit — at great risk — as leverage to get at them, when you can simply go after them (again and again) without taking those risks?
Here, anti-spenders have the upper hand: It’s the pro-spenders who need legislation to pass — stalemate is failure for them. They need new money to fund programs already created, as well as to create new ones.
Instead, take a page from the other side’s playbook. Liberals increased spending at every opportunity — some large, some small, but always some — over decades. Conservatives should now seek continuous cutting.
Make the most of the debt-ceiling debate, but don’t expect it to be a shortcut to achieving every dream. The liberal-spending edifice was built over decades, and won’t be dismantled in just days.
The longest journey begins with a single step — it’s not completed in just one.
J.T. Young served in the Treasury De partment and the Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004 and as a con gressional staffer from 1987-2000.