House Speaker John Boehner was dealt a lousy hand in the fiscal cliff negotiations; it’s also fair to say he played that bad hand badly. Very badly.
Both sides came to the negotiations with a goal: Democrats wanted to raise taxes, Republicans wanted to cut government spending. If a deal is cut, Democrats will get their tax hikes and the only thing Republicans will get is the blame.
President Obama has taken every opportunity to explain why he thinks raising taxes on high earners will increase government revenues. But no one knows what government spending Republicans would cut, or why — and that’s the problem.
The GOP has never identified some of the most egregious examples that would help win the public to their side. That’s Boehner’s fault. He needed the Republican Conference pressing one message: Before Washington raises taxes on anyone, it needs to cut wasteful spending — and then provide specific examples.
Identifying outrageous spending items is easy because the government-spending binge provides plenty of examples.
Just last week, Obama Labor Secretary Hilda Solis announced a $2.2 million grant to Haiti and Peru to strengthen their labor unions. And two weeks ago the Labor Department awarded $35 million to fight child labor in seven countries. Is that a good way to spend borrowed money?
And it is all borrowed. As Mark Litow and I have pointed out, U.S. entitlement programs and interest on the federal debt consume nearly every dollar the federal government receives in revenue. So if the country is playing sugar daddy to other countries, we are doing it with borrowed money.
Or how about Obama’s recent commitment to provide $6 billion to support “[b]ilateral and multilateral energy and environmental initiatives … in the Asia Pacific, and the United States, in partnership with Brunei and Indonesia.”
Borrowing $6 billion from Asia so we can give it back to Asia. What a deal!
In a report earlier this year, the Brookings Institution estimated the administration will spend $150 billion on numerous green energy projects between 2009 and 2014. Why don’t Republicans cut any future spending under the battle cry “No more Solyndras”?
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) told the press recently that he could cut $600 billion in federal spending overnight and no one would notice except a few people in Washington. Well, let’s give him the chance.
Coburn has released his “Waste Book 2012”— all 202 pages of it — in which he highlights billions of dollars in silly and wasteful federal spending. Here is National Journal’s top 10:
- $325,000 for an effort to build a lifelike Robo-Squirrel.
- $27 million for a project that included pottery classes for Moroccan artists translated by someone who was not fluent in English — and using materials that cannot be purchased in Morocco.
- Almost $50,000 for Smokey the Bear hot-air balloon appearances.
- $505,000 in block grants for a pet shampoo and toothpaste company.
- $520,000 for an Ohio bridge that doesn’t connect to a road or trail.
- $40,000 for a video game based on Thoreau’s writings at Walden Pond.
- More than $540,000 for a dancing robot that DJs smartphones.
- Nearly $68,000 for a “Students Against Trash” poster campaign.
- $6.9 million for research into making rubber-free tires from natural materials.
- $35,000 for a book vending machine.
The public would be outraged at spending $325,000 on Robo-Squirrel if they knew about it. So why don’t Republicans mention it every chance they got?
And let’s not forget the recent General Services Administration (GSA) scandal, where government employees spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on parties and then awarded themselves $44 million in bonuses.
Had Republicans constantly hammered the waste, fraud and overspending — identifying specific examples — they could have forced Democrats to defend it or concede that spending needed to be cut. Then the debate would have focused more on what to cut, rather than how much revenue to raise.
Of course, Obama defenders would have said there isn’t enough waste to make much difference in Obama’s trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits.
Maybe, but that’s like someone pooh-poohing the idea of a morbidly obese person losing only 20 pounds. At least it’s a start.
But Republicans have let Obama and the Democrats define the debate, and so the only question on the table has been who gets higher taxes. The only spending cuts in the fiscal cliff negotiations are focused on Medicare and Social Security cost-of-living increases — both of which are losers when it comes to energizing the public to your side.
Republicans might have won this debate had they made a real issue of egregious government spending and pressed the examples whenever they could — just as they did repeatedly over the sordid happenings in Benghazi.
Boehner never initiated a spending-cut PR campaign. And so Republicans are, once again, hoping they will be able to get some cuts in the next round of fiscal negotiations. But it won’t happen until they learn how to make excessive government spending the issue.