Congressional Democrats to Bail on Budget for 2011

“Budget?  We don’t need no stinking budget.” That is what Congressional Democrats seem to be saying, kind of like the classic line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (“Badges?  I don’t have to show you no stinking badges!”).  Until now, the US House of Representatives has never failed to pass a budget since the 1974 Budgeting Act established procedures for federal budgeting.  What does this odd omission of a US Federal Budget for 2011 portend?

It is certainly a strange time not to have a federal budget.  Budget resolutions are non-binding, but like a family budget, they do provide a framework for controlling spending.  The federal debt is scheduled to rise to over 90% of GNP in five to ten years, leading to a Greece-style economic collapse. But unlike Greece, there is no one out there to bail us out.  A fiscal 911 is on its way, except it won’t be a surprise. When will we act to stop it?

Before the Democrats took office  the national debt was $56,000 per household.  Now it’s $72,000 per household.  These figures do not count the $379,000 per household in unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare.

Some have said for a long time that we need a lockbox for Social Security and Medicare.  But through their inactions our politicians have always responded, “We don’t need no stinking lockbox!”  They have spent all of those payroll taxes, including those paid by some of America’s lowest-wage workers. Nothing is there but an IOU.  Demographics have turned a reasonable program into a pyramid scheme worthy of Bernie Madoff while Congress, term after term, has buried its head in the sand.  Re-elections are, after all, more fun than hard choices.

And now, in times of increasingly harder choices and oncoming fiscal calamity, Congress is not even planning to restrain spending through the use of a tool as routine as a budget.

Forget terrorism, global warming or any social problem that might come to mind.  In the United States and in Europe, debt is the crisis of our time, and our “leaders” – President Obama, House Speaker Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Reid – are willfully looking the other way.  Moreover, they have made the situation much worse through the creation a new entitlement – an attempt at universal healthcare insurance – without first reforming the old entitlements.  Indeed, like the bandits in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,  they robbed to get what they  wanted: they stole from Medicare, a program already going broke.

The Democrats poured in $125.9 billion so far to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (institutions Democrats refused to reform years ago), with no effort to change the programs partially responsible for the financial collapse.  Fannie and Freddie need no stinking badges either, just taxpayer cash.  Now they want $19 billion more to save private profit at public expense.  At least bailed-out corporations in wholly private industry, from Goldman Sachs to GM, are paying back owed taxpayer money.  If you want to know why Fannie and Freddie are not being reformed, just look at who they are paying off with campaign donations.

Certainly not all of this debt is the Democrats’ fault.  Congressional Republican majorities have not lifted a finger to reform entitlements either.  President George W. Bush added a Medicare drug benefit without paying for it, and launched the war in Iraq, which was wrong for a lot reasons, including its massive expense.  But Bush, to his credit, tried to reform Social Security.   Congress said no.

Unless something changes, Obama, Pelosi and Reid will be remembered as the Neville Chamberlains of the Great American Fiscal Collapse. Politicians don’t seem to appreciate the extent to which the American people demand action on spending and the debt.

Concern – or fury – over federal spending and the growth of the national debt is at the heart of the Tea Party movement.   The Left likes to pretend that the Tea Party consists of racists and other nitwits without any legitimate arguments to make about the direction of the country, but demonizing the Tea Party won’t work.  Most Centrists and Independents, and even many Democrats, though they do not watch Glenn Beck or believe that Sarah Palin is presidential timber, share Tea Party concerns about out-of-control federal spending.  They will vote to purge any politician, Democrat or Republican, who appears to put a political career above the fiscal stability of the country.  Tuesday’s results and recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts offer ample evidence of this.

Congressional leaders obviously lack the courage to pass a budget.  They don’t want to showcase their fiscal irresponsibility, call for higher taxes or cut spending, so they refrain from passing a budget and hope no one notices.   But citizens are paying attention.  Here’s betting that the American people won’t sit by and watch the United States destroyed from within by irresponsible politicians who care more about their ideologies and political careers than they do about the long-term good of the country.   Politicians who don’t bother to write a budget to live by in these fiscally perilous times betray the public trust and are unworthy of the offices they hold.