The Associated Press carried a story Monday that, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ran under the headline: “Defense cuts test lawmakers’ resolve on deficits.” The gist of the story was that while members of Congress claim to want to reduce spending, when the cuts affect their districts, the support vanishes.
It’s an all-too-familiar scenario among legislative bodies: everybody wants to accomplish something, but no one wants to be inconvenienced to make it happen. Yet there is little good that can be accomplished without some expense or sacrifice.
In the AP story, the savings, estimated at tens of billions of dollars a year from shrinking the military comes at the expense of jobs. The plan calls for the end of the Air Force’s long-range surveillance drone, the Global Hawk. Naturally, legislators in California, where it is made, are fighting against that particular cut that would eliminate thousands of jobs.
We’ve seen that story before. Whenever a base is proposed for closure, communities rally to protect it, generally citing the damage to the economy — as opposed to the ability of America to defend itself — as the reason the base should remain open.
“It’s funny that we want to save money everywhere except when it can bother us,” remarked Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC.
He might as well have added, “and it always bothers us.”
The same sort of conundrum arises when Congress attempts to reduce the federal deficit. Whether the method is a spending cut or a tax increase, the lobbyists on Capitol Hill and the general public raise the alarm. Nobody is willing to see their program or their entitlement sacrificed for the good of the country, and elected officials willing to vote against that tide of opposition will be vilified for that courage in the next election.
By contrast, it is easy for Congress to approve a tax cut because the beneficiaries are thrilled to have extra money in their pockets, regardless of how it affects the deficit. Even the “temporary” tax cuts (the Bush cuts for the wealthy and the supposed one-year reduction in Social Security withholding) prove impossible to end because their termination is declared a “tax increase,” words that bestow panic on much of the public.
Congress deserves all the blame we can muster for these impasses, but in the end American citizens must accept responsibility as well. Through our individual special interest groups, from AARP to the American Medical Association, and through our calls, letters and e-mails to our congressmen, we’re all, like the California legislators, protecting our turf, our interests — indignant that we are singled out to take the hit and figuring someone else should make the sacrifice. Until such time as the public is willing to pay more, get by with less or do without, it’s unreasonable to expect Congress to make more than symbolic inroads on the deficits. Until the public backs its deficit reducing rhetoric with a willingness to accept the consequences, members of Congress are going to continue doing what they do best — make inflammatory statements on the news shows to blame the opposition party.
