BALANCE THE DAMN BUDGET!!!

by Robert Tracinski

Correction: Thanks to the many TIA Daily readers who pointed out that Blanche Lincoln, whom I mentioned in the previous edition of TIA Daily, is the outgoing senator from Arkansas, not Nebraska. I'm not sure whether I should offer my apologies to the people of Nebraska, for implying that they voted her into office in the first place, or to the people of Arkansas, for denying them credit for voting her out.—RWT

Shortly after President Obama took office, Tony Blankley wrote a brilliant column in which he pointed out that the "Reagan Revolution" was not won in November of 1980. It was won in subsequent years as Reagan got credit for the successful results of his policies. Blankley then projected that Obama's legacy would be won or lost as he actually implemented his policies—which is exactly what happened. The same will hold true for congressional Republicans.

As Churchill said after the Battle of El-Alamein, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." The enemies of liberty have been advancing relentlessly for two years, and they have just been pushed back and brought to a standstill. Now is when the real battle begins.

So what should Republicans do? What should be the centerpiece of their legislative agenda? Yes, they should make the Bush tax rates permanent. They should vote to repeal ObamaCare, even if it won't get through the Senate, just as a symbol of their commitment. Substantively, they should vote to de-fund the implementation of ObamaCare, and they should also de-fund the EPA's attempt to impose controls on carbon dioxide emissions.

But there is one proposal that stands out above the others. It is brutally simple, yet it encapsulates the essential political, economic, and ideological issues at stake.

Balance the damn budget.

The beauty of this legislative goal is its simplicity. Balancing the budget—not spending more than the government takes in—is one of the most basic responsibilities of a legislature. If they are not competent to make the numbers add up and zero out in their budget, they are not competent to hold office, period.

Yet this is not simple at all, not after the epic spending binge of the last two years. In fact, the numbers are quite unforgiving. The 2007 budget called for $2.78 trillion of spending on $2.54 trillion of revenue. President Obama's 2011 budget proposal calls for $3.83 trillion of spending on $2.57 trillion of revenue. In other words, government revenue hasn't grown—but spending has increased by more than a trillion dollars. And non-defense discretionary spending is only $670 billion. So-called "mandatory" spending on welfare and entitlement programs uses up all but about $200 billion of federal revenue, leaving practically nothing for the constitutionally mandated tasks of national defense, foreign relations, courts, and law enforcement.

Yet the size of this problem is the very reason for confronting it. I'm not normally the kind of pundit who declares that balancing the budget is the top issue. When the deficit was only $200 billion on $3 trillion of spending, I could tell what the bigger problem was. But with deficits surging past $1 trillion, the deficit practically is the budget—and the debt that is piling up becomes an immediate crisis.

Moreover, Congress can't make up for the shortfall by increasing taxes. Obama has already given ground on extending the Bush tax rates. He now says that he only wants to raise taxes on those who make more than one million dollars per year. But just in terms of the numbers—from the perspective of balancing the damn budget—a tax on millionaires is insignificant. It can't raise enough money to even get near to closing the gap. Raising taxes on the rich isn't a serious budget measure; it's just revenge against the successful.

More fundamentally, tax increases do not count as Congress balancing the budget. Tax hikes are Congress's way of making us balance the budget for them. Instead, we should insist that Congress make the hard choices necessary to reduce spending to bring it in line with current tax rates.

That brings us to the key ideological issue behind this campaign. By demanding that Congress balance the damn budget, we are saying that they are no exception. They do not get to keep increasing their spending indefinitely, with no regard for their revenues or the astronomical debt they are piling up. We don't get to do that, so neither should they. The government has neither a first claim nor an unlimited claim on the nation's wealth and economic vitality. It doesn't exist as some superior entity above us that is freed from all constraints. We've tightened our belts to get ourselves through the recession, and now it's the government's turn.

Balancing the damn budget is also a good vehicle for a lot of other measures which, taken one by one, might be small cuts in terms of direct government spending—but which are big cuts in the power and economic cost of government. It provides a framework for banning earmarks, zeroing out funding for state-funded leftist propaganda outlets like NPR and PBS, defunding ObamaCare, defunding EPA carbon regulations, shutting down TARP, reclaiming unspent stimulus funds from all of those non-shovel-ready projects, and taking back the payoffs to the public employees unions. All of this can and should be included under the banner of balancing the damn budget, because all of them are example of the looting of the public treasury that has caused our government to grow out of control.

And over the long term, a campaign to balance the damn budget will commit the Republicans to a reform—at the very least—of the big middle class entitlements. Over the coming decades, these programs will become the single biggest factor pushing government to expand beyond its means. To balance the damn budget, we will eventually need to challenge the basic structure and rationale of these programs.

There is a lot of ideological freight carried by this one idea—yet it is easy to grasp and to sell to the American people. Precisely because it is such a basic aspect of governance, balancing the damn budget will appeal to all of those non-ideological swing voters who tell us they just want Congress to stop bickering and do the people's work. Well, what is more basic to the people's work than making sure that the government is solvent?

These non-ideological swing voters can be maddening, because they insist on telling us that they want Congress to stop arguing and get work done—but they don't want to take a stand on the basic ideological question that is the source of all the arguing, which is: what kind of work should the government be doing? Yet there is also something healthy in this approach. Because the mainstream American voter is non-ideological, he doesn't put bad ideology over the basic requirements of America's economic survival—basic requirements like balancing the damn budget.

Stating such a basic, simple goal also cuts through a lot of the political games that are used in Washington to dodge the real issues. For example, the Democrats will want to shift the focus to rallying various pressure groups to protest against cuts in their handouts—but Republicans can respond by saying, "All we're trying to do is just to balance the damn budget," which shifts the focus back where it belongs. As for the Democrats' demands that Republicans compromise with the administration, the new House leadership can just tell President Obama that they are open to compromise on any proposal he wants to offer about how we're going to balance the damn budget. We will list the spending we would like to cut, and he can list the spending he would like to cut, and we'll start bargaining.

Of course, the best part of this political strategy is that it puts the Republican leadership in a position where they can't back down, because all of their political advantages disappear if they go wobbly. You can't justify an intransigent political stand and painful spending cuts just to reduce spending by a little bit. You can only justify them for a clear, hard-and-fast, and obviously reasonable goal: balancing the damn budget.

It also connects to what many voters say is the top issue for them: high unemployment and the continuing weakness of the economy. This proposal takes head-on the idea that you grow the economy by growing government. Instead, it insists that Congress can clear the way for economic growth by reducing the burden of a ruinous debt—something which, unlike debt-fueled Keynesian "stimulus," actually makes sense to anyone who has ever managed a business or household budget.

But this proposal does not promise an immediate economic result, which is beyond the power of Congress, much less only one house of Congress. Instead, it promises only what is under the control of Republicans in Congress.

With a strong House majority, Republicans have only one unambiguous power: the power of the purse. As the house of Congress that controls all revenue measures, the House gets to write the budget. Moreover, Senate rules require that the overall budget blueprint cannot be filibustered, so all Republicans need to pass their budget is the support of a bare majority in the Senate. The Republicans are a few votes shy—but there are quite a few Democratic senators in right-leaning states who are up for re-election in 2012. Jim Manchin, for example, won his West Virginia seat by campaigning as if he were Ronald Reagan—and by campaigning against the Democratic leadership. Since he's filling the remainder of Robert Byrd's term, he has to run again in 2012. He has no choice but to vote with the Republicans, especially on such a basic issue as balancing the damn budget.

So Republicans can say to the allegedly "conservative" Democrats in the Senate: if you want to prove to the voters that you are serious, how about working with us to balance the damn budget?

And there is one other big political advantage for whoever decides to take up this campaign. A lot of what Republicans will be called on to do in the next Congress consists of preventing bad things from happening, but it's hard to get credit for what people don't see. Balancing the damn budget, by contrast, is a tangible, positive achievement that Republicans—and specifically a House majority—can take back to the voters in 2012 and claim credit for.

If Republicans do choose to take up the slogan "balance the damn budget"—whether it's the leadership or an insurgent Tea Party faction—let me give them one piece of advice: keep the "damn" in there. The American people will love you for it, because it will show that you are finally taking the issue of controlling government as seriously as they do.

In the days after the election, we've heard some good words from the Republican establishment about cutting spending and listening to the American people. But are they willing to follow through? This is their most serious test: will they balance the damn budget?

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