Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute focuses his latest National Review Online column on congressional Republicans’ questionable dedication to trimming the fat in the federal budget.
Too many Republicans don’t really want to cut spending — or, at least, not spending that benefits their own constituencies.
Recall that during last year’s presidential campaign, Mitt Romney’s big complaint about Obamacare was that it cut $716 billion from Medicare over ten years. Medicare is facing a minimum of $42 trillion in future red ink. Perhaps someone should be praised for cutting it. It would have made sense to criticize the president for spending those savings on other aspects of Obamacare. One could certainly question whether the president’s proposed cuts were the best way to reduce Medicare spending, or even whether they would be effective. But Governor Romney focused his criticism on the idea of the cuts themselves.
Elsewhere, Republicans continue to resist any efforts to reduce defense spending. Modest defense cuts were included in the sequester of course — over the strenuous objections of GOP hawks such as John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Representative Buck McKeon. But advocates of increased defense spending have hardly given up the fight — expect continued efforts this fall to undo the sequester’s effects on the Pentagon.
There is also some parochialism: attempting to funnel federal money to one’s district at the expense of the broader public purse. Thus Representative Steve Stockman of Texas opposes cuts to NASA (invoking the specter of an asteroid crashing into Earth), and Representative Jim Jordan pushes the army to buy Abrams tanks, built in his home state of Ohio, it says it doesn’t need. Republican senators from farm states are among the biggest defenders of farm subsidies. Representatives from the northeast demanded federal assistance after Hurricane Sandy. And so on.
More of it is just political cowardice, out of fear of cutting something that might offend some voter, somewhere.
