By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on January 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46710/
Americans from all walks of life rejoiced last week when the House, as part of the new Democratic majority's "100 hours agenda," passed pay-as-you-go rules for Congressional budgeting by a 280-152 vote.
Or maybe not. On its face, the measure appears to be the type of eye-watering technocratic fix so popular with the Clinton-era policy set. After a decade of reckless borrow-and-spend governance, "paygo" looks like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic -- tinkering around the edges of a federal government with screwy priorities and a dysfunctional legislative system.
And on one level, paygo's just that. The rules simply require that lawmakers say how they'll pay for their proposals -- they have to specify up front whether they'll pay for new spending with more taxes or by cutting other programs, and if they offer new tax cuts they have to say what programs they'll cut or eliminate to offset the lost revenue.
On another level, though, paygo rules drive a stake into the heart of the New Conservative project. Sold as a means of balancing the budget, they are, in fact, about transparency. Paygo rules force lawmakers to put their cards on the table, and that makes it much harder to sell the American people on the central duplicity of what passes for "conservatism" among Republicans these days. Last year I described that fraud -- one that's driven much of the GOP's success in recent years -- like this:
The Big Lie -- the deceit that's won them so many elections -- is that they can offer government that's just as big, but Americans won't ever have to pay for it. All the services you want and half the taxes! Eat ice-cream all day long and never put on a pound! Who wouldn't vote for such a utopian crock?
Long ago, conservatives realized that people, often for good reason, don't like the idea of "Big Government" in the abstract. But voters love it in the specific; they want a government that will educate their children and put out forest fires and pay for their million-dollar cancer treatments and keep them from having to eat cat food after they've put in decades of sweat contributing to the American economy. They expect cheap student loans and meat inspections and smooth highways, and even the lowest of "low information" voters know they're not going to get that stuff from the private sector. In short, people won't vote for politicians who honestly endorse a scorched earth, slash-and-burn libertarianism, and the right knows it.
While November's electoral "thumping" caused 48 Republicans to vote for the new rules in the House, they've spent the last five years fighting against paygo. Conservative pundits invented a distinction between "spending paygo" and "revenue paygo," arguing that the Democrats' plan is a stealthy way of raising taxes (they want unbreakable spending caps like those in the wildly unpopular TABOR laws passed with disastrous results in Colorado and proposed in several other states). Rep Paul Ryan (R-WI), the top Republican on the House's Budget Committee, told Bloomberg News: "This will have the practical effect of simply raising taxes.'' "We don't have a tax revenue problem in Washington," he added, "we have a spending problem."
He's wrong; we have a transparency problem, and a serious one. And while some conservatives have offered legitimate criticism about the ease with which the rules can be waived, paygo -- combined with another measure passed by the House that forces lawmakers to go public with their "ear-marks" (funds set aside for projects in their home districts) -- force a measure of honesty into the federal budgeting process that's been sorely lacking in recent years.
Paygo rules in effect for much of the 1990s under Clinton helped turn mammoth budget deficits into surpluses; he took over a budget that was over $300 billion in the red and handed over a $25 billion dollar surplus to Bush in 2001. The very next year -- in the new president's first budget -- the deficit shot back up to $320 billion, and it's been growing ever since. (Some conservatives claim, falsely, that it had nothing to do with the paygo rules, which the Republicans blew off in 2002.)
According to a recent Congressional analysis (the latest in a long line of such reports), a good chunk of Bush's deficit spending bought tax cuts for the idle rich. The New York Times reported that "Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush's tax cuts," while "tax rates for middle-income earners edged up in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available…" Bush wouldn't have been able to grease the palms of his country-club friends if he had been forced to admit he couldn't pay for them, or if he had had to come clean with the "death by a thousand cuts" in popular services that he's made, largely under the radar.
The right-wing has worked overtime to make revenues and spending an abstraction. By re-linking them in a concrete way, the Democrats are under-cutting a key structural advantage on which the GOP has long relied -- the ability to make unsustainable promises and still claim to be for limited government.
The House passed internal paygo rules last week, but there's talk of making it the law of the land for both chambers. It'll face a tough fight in the Senate and will have to get past Bush's veto pen.
But Senate Democrats should be only too happy to force the issue, framing it as a matter of transparency as well as fiscal sanity. Not only is it a hard thing for legislators who claim to have a libertarian or fiscally conservative streak to vote against it in an era when Congress's shortcomings are center-stage, but it's the type of measure that -- while not terribly sexy -- gives the Dems an opportunity to use their majority to take apart the Republican machine built by Tom DeLay and his cronies. That'll be a long-term project for sure, but the Democrats appear to be getting into the game.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
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