Except for those of us who understand that the really important thing happening in Washington today is the Redskins-Cowboys game, most eyes are on the fiscal cliff negotiations. Calamity awaits, we’re told, and if nothing gets settled, and we just keep watching the news, they’ll tell us when the calamity has occurred – because otherwise we wouldn’t actually notice much of anything for a month or two. But this isn’t the first cliff; in fact, it wouldn’t be a cliff if not for the effects of falling off the earlier cliffs, some large, some small.
- The Lower Taxes/Smaller Government Cliff: This one didn’t have to be a cliff; it could have been a fairly gentle downhill stroll. In 2000, there was a Federal surplus of roughly $120 billion, the fourth consecutive year of surpluses. In 2001, George Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress passed a massive tax cut bill, followed by another in 2003. The deficit immediately began climbing, to $150 billion in 2002 and $375 billion on 2003. Yet even though the Republicans held the White House and both houses of Congress, there was never any significant reduction in spending. We’re often subjected to (mostly) Republican politicians offering analogies comparing the Federal budget to household budgets – a household simply can’t keep spending more than it makes, and neither should the government (except that many households do exactly that, whipping out their credit cards with regularity). It’s not really that great of an analogy – the Roosevelt Institute has one explanation (“The Federal Budget is NOT like a Household Budget: Here’s Why“) – but it does have a certain amount of usefulness. Here’s how it is useful – the very people who keep trotting this out are the ones who completely ignored it. In fact, they reduced the amount of money the household had coming in, and kept on spending. If the Republicans wanted to cut taxes and reduce the size of government, they should have done that. But they didn’t. And when they didn’t, they started tearing chunks out of the downhill slope.
- The Payroll Tax Cliff: A clifflet, really. It doesn’t actually play a part in the deficit equation, but it’s a cliff in it’s own realm. This was a purely political ploy that gained essentially no political benefit. A small reduction in paycheck withholding, so small many never really noticed, that had the effects of bringing the social security problem closer and creating yet another instance of the expiration of a temporary tax cut being labeled as a tax increase, thereby countering the small original political benefit with a larger political detriment. As my father once said, it’s much easier to pick up a squirrel than it is to put it back down.
- The Partisanship Cliff: This is the one that makes the others so difficult. Democracies exist on debate, compromise, give and take. It’s an often-messy process that leaves most people only partially satisfied, at least initially. It’s a rare event that finds unanimous or near-unanimous support. Yet despite frequent bitter debates and contentious issues, we as a nation have generally resolved things and moved forward. At some point in the recent past, however, this process got bogged down. It’s hard to say when and where it moved from intense debate to outright hostility and obstinacy, to positions locked into inflexibility, yet here we are. Certainly one step along the way came when the Senate became a body where 60 votes were needed to accomplish anything. The Senate now is one small rung above dysfunction. Another factor is the number of representatives who come from districts which have been engineered to lock in one party or the other, making the incumbent safe from challenge, short of, in the words of Edwin Edwards, being caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. The majority party in the House seems to be held hostage by one faction of it’s membership. Compromise, which once was an honored part of the American political tradition, has come to be considered a moral failing. Congress has an approval rating somewhere in the mid-teens, yet senators and representatives fear electoral retribution if they change what they’ve been doing. And so, with issue after issue, we watch as Congress is unable to act, and we fall farther down.
We’ve had similar times in our history when the gap between the sides was wide and seemingly insurmountable – it wasn’t that long ago, in historical terms, when we went to war with each other – yet we did manage to finally come back together. And we will this time, in some form or fashion. The question is, how extreme will things have to get before we draw back from the edge?
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