There is a childish naivete to the fiscal thinking of the Republican Party that would be endearing if it wasn’t costing the country so much damn money. Talking Points Memo has been having some fun with this because it goes right to the heart of how disastrously dysfunctional the Republican Party has become. On the one side you’ve got Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan and his Budget of Doom that calls for things so politically toxic they defeated Bush the Younger at the height of his powers in early 2005. Ryan, by the way, won his last election by almost thirty points and outspent his token opposition more than $10-$1. He can afford to say things that are politically unacceptable to the Red Leadership because his seat is as safe as safe can be.
On the other side you’ve got John Boehner who very much wants to be Speaker of the House and knows that if the general public begins associating House Republicans with Medicare cuts and the destruction of Social Security he’ll never get close to Nancy Pelosi’s gavel. When asked what he disagreed with in Ryan’s Budget of Doom, however, Boehner said, “Off the top of my head, I couldn’t tell you”. Boehner and other nationally minded Republicans are caught in a bind, Ryan’s ideas are ones they like and endorse, but they’re also massively unpopular. So all they can do is mumble and hope that no serious national attention is directed their way.
The reason for this all this misdirection and coyness is simple, the federal budget is in deep shit and there are only two ways to fix it: A) slashing federal spending or B) raising taxes. (Those are simplifications, but they’re basically true.) What’s so commendable about the budget put out by Ryan is that it shows what it would really take to implement Option A. It means gutting the federal government’s two biggest programs, Social Security and Medicare. (This is, of course, if we assume his little privatization gimmicks will work. They probably wouldn’t but for the purposes of this discussion we can give him the benefit of the doubt.) The problem, and the reason Boehner ran screaming from this budget like it was cursed by demons, is that Social Security and Medicare are extremely popular programs. It’s not for nothing that Social Security is referred to as the “third rail” of American politics and Medicare is so popular that a lot of rightists can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge that it’s a government program. So much for Option A.
All you’re left with then is Option B (raise taxes) which is philosophically anathema to the right wing. So long as defense spending is sacrosanct there is no Option C and that means that you’re left with nothing at all. If you’re not willing to implement either A or B, then you don’t have anything useful to say. Boehner may or may not get his soft, improbably orange hands on a gavel, but until he and the rest of the Red leadership sack up and go for A or B (neither of which seems likely) no real progress can be made. How does that old phrase go? Lead, follow or get out of the way?
Nevermind. That’s probably too much to ask all at once. How about just stopping your enormously expensive game of Let’s Pretend?
