LITTLE ROCK — There is a number that dominates American politics: 1.5 trillion.
That is the size of the federal budget deficit, which has surpassed our entire Gross Domestic Product.
Many state governments, in proportionate terms, face even more dismal financial prospects.
A number of implications flow from such circumstances. The first is that the dreams of liberals for another installment of the New Deal that accompanied Barack Obama’s election are long gone. There will be no new government programs of any significance for many years; most existent ones will be cut, many severely.
Democrats will be spending the better part of the next decade fighting a desperate rear-guard action to salvage cherished welfare-state programs and public-sector union perks in the face of harsh budget logic. The central Democratic political objective to constantly increase the percentage of Americans dependent upon a government check will be decisively undercut.
Obama’s feckless budget proposals and his endorsement of the publicsector union shenanigans in Wisconsin have confirmed the suspicion that liberals live in a fantasy land where there is no meaningful linkage between government revenues and expenditures. Henceforth, whenever a Democrat pays lip service to the goal of deficit reduction, eyes will roll and chortles will follow.
What Ronald Reagan used to incessantly say about government, that it was “the problem, not the solution,” now can be accurately said about our party of government. Thus it will beleft up to the other guys, the GOP, to do what must be done.
The Republican challenge on this will be twofold: to muster the courage, as governors like Chris Christie and Scott Walker have, to make the kinds of cuts in government spending that Democrats are congenitally incapable of making and then to effectively explain to voters why the resulting pain is necessary.
In those efforts, they will have to withstand the tantrums and jeering from the sidelines of the other side, which can be expected to deploy in tandem both mobs and demagoguery fully amplified by sympathetic media.
In making their case and sticking to it in the face of such attacks, GOP leaders will have to re-educate the public about the welfare-state concept. Central to this effort will be to convince that the welfare state is a luxury that, in the broad expanse of human historical experience, has been possible only under conditions of mass affluence.
The idea that we are entitled to the fruits of others’ labor loses its moral urgency when such affluence ends. A family that can’t meet its house payments is unlikely to double its level of charitable giving; if anything, it will have cut it back, perhaps entirely.
Similar logic applies to publicsector unions. The gravy train had a glorious run, but has now come to the end of the line. In this area, too, the GOP will have to reintroduce the electorate to the once-commonsensical idea that public employees work for us, not the other way around.
Taxpayers are suddenly rediscovering their right to decide how much public employees earn and are even awakening to the possibility that they can revoke the collective bargaining rights of public unions on the grounds that they are injurious to fiscal responsibility and provocation toward corruption.
Selfishness has now acquired a new poster child in the form of public-union members claiming immunity from cuts in salary and benefits at a time when many of their fellow citizens who pay for those salaries and benefits find themselves in unemployment lines.
Political venality also has received new imagery in the spectacle of Wisconsin and Indiana Democrats fleeing their state to prevent votes on legislation their union masters don’t approve of. In states like New York and California, it is not uncommon for police officers to retire at age 50 with pensions that provide 90 percent of their former salary. Do Democrats really want to defend that? In times like these?
Obama claims that a war is being waged against public-sector unions. Let us hope so. And also hope that the taxpayers win it.
-
———◊-
———
Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville.
Editorial, Pages 75 on 02/27/2011