The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Democrats defeated President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress with a spending-bill deal suiting their political druthers, or so it is said. The truth is that all sides more or less conspired to defeat the American people, to set us up for a mighty fall through economic ruination. This is not trivial politics at work. It is tragically irresponsible negligence threatening one and all.
The overriding budgetary need was and is to do something about a $20 trillion debt on its way to disaster, and there is just one solution. Take on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Despite elitist pretense, media mindlessness and bureaucratic gobbledygook, the costs are mounting unsustainably and adjustment is fiscally mandatory. We’re talking about 60 percent of the budget, deficits in the tens of billions, and collapse just a decade away.
Minus change, we’ll have debt payments and entitlements gobbling up every nickel of federal revenue, leaving nothing for anything else.
That’s the estimate of accomplished, bipartisan analysts, but meanwhile any attempt at sensible rectification quickly encounters politically advantageous, utterly deceptive outrage about cheating beneficiaries. The real cheating is to do nothing.
Trump is as bad on this front as spend-us-to-death Democrats and worsened it all by seeking an increased expenditure as cringeworthy as they come.
He wanted billions for the building of his adored wall on the Mexican border. There are other much, much cheaper ways of equally stymying the flow of illegal immigrants and this extravagance seemed particularly obnoxious when you look at one cut he vainly sought. It was in research funding at the National Institutes for Health at a time when important discoveries seem on the horizon.
But his total request for domestic cuts amounted to $18 billion, most made absolute sense, and Democrats instead boosted domestic spending by $5 billion with Republicans nodding their heads.
The genius of America, at least once upon a time, was people boosting their communities on their own, through churches, civic associations, businesses, charitable groups and more. This is a statist era, however, and so it is beyond the imagining of some that the federal government would not intervene everywhere and that state and local governments are too often left out of the picture. What we have in this trillion-dollar deal is an underlying sense that central planning can easily outsmart the free choices of millions of citizens.
What we have ended up with in this conglomeration is 1,600 pages of too many ill-considered, unjustified, even dangerous decisions documenting the self-serving ineptness of those governing us.
Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for McClatchy-Tribune. Readers may send him email at speaktojay@aol.com.
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