Here’s a joke for you: President Obama nearly bankrupts the country with his out-of-control deficit spending — then demands responsible fiscal leadership from the Republicans.
OK, this is no time for humor: The country faces a deadline of Aug. 2 to either raise the debt ceiling from $14.3 trillion to around $16 trillion or face the prospect of defaulting on our loans and cutting services.
But jokers seem to be all we have in Washington these days, with the president as comedian-in-chief.
Who but a comic could propose (as Obama did back in February) a $3.7 trillion budget that would have added $7.2 trillion more to the national debt by 2021?
When that drew universal scorn, who but a jokester would then have followed with a specifics-free do-over speech on fiscal policy in April? That “plan” was so funny that, when asked about its budgetary effects, Congressional Budget Office chief Douglas Elmendorf cracked, “We don’t estimate speeches.”
And who but a funnyman would explicitly threaten senior citizens, as Obama did this week, by saying he couldn’t “guarantee” that Social Security checks would go out on schedule next month if an agreement to raise the borrowing limit can’t be reached?
Meanwhile, no Democratic-controlled chamber of Congress has been able to pass a budget in two years: They refuse to cut spending, they don’t dare raise taxes without Republican cover — and now even new borrowing could become impossible.
Then-Sen. Obama had it right back in 2006: “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. . . Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that the buck stops here.”
That was then, this is now, and politics is still the name of the game. What’s going on in Washington isn’t a serious conversation about how to halt and reverse the ruinous growth of federal spending, but the usual jockeying for position as election season approaches.
How else to explain Obama’s adamant refusal to put some serious numbers on the table? The administration’s talks with the GOP leadership broke down over the weekend largely because the president is only willing to offer — wait for it — a grand total of $2 billion in real spending cuts in 2012.
That’s it — $2 billion with a “b,” out of a projected deficit of more than a trillion dollars. No wonder Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that no solution to the debt problem is possible as long as Obama is in office.
Yet McConnell isn’t much better. With Republicans terrified that they’ll be blamed if Grandma doesn’t get her Social Security check, he has floated a “last resort,” Rube Goldbergian plan. He’d allow Obama to raise the debt ceiling on his own, three times at up to $900 billion a pop, subject to an all-but-impossible congressional veto — all in the hopes that the public (which opposes raising the debt limit by a 2-to-1 margin) will blame the president.
Time for the Republicans to man up and end this laugh riot. Do they really think the public would blame them if Obama directs the Treasury Department not to issue Social Security checks? If Obama holds up military pay or executes any of the sky-is-falling scenarios he and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have been floating?
Just to be clear: If the debt limit isn’t raised, the Treasury can still cover obligations like debt service. The government takes in $200 billion a month. It can still spend — it just can’t spend as much. And it’s the Executive Branch that must decide which checks don’t go out.
The GOP needs to hold the line: No tax hikes, no more borrowing to spend on unreformed, unaffordable programs.
Americans aren’t stupid: They know where the buck stops.
And where the jokes need to stop, too. Obama inadvertently let the Social Security cat out of its imaginary “lockbox” when he threatened to stop the checks. Because there is no trust fund: Social Security is paid either out of current revenues or with borrowed money. It’s a pyramid scheme that’s running out of suckers.
The president and Congress should take this moment to level with the American people about the solvency of entitlement programs, but of course they won’t.
Because the joke’s on us.