The Republican negotiators who on Thursday walked out of budget negotiations over how to limit the federal debt – and the conditions they are demanding for raising the current debt ceiling to protect America’s credit rating and economy – seem to be in denial about how the nation came to be stuck with a $14 trillion-plus federal debt.
In fact, the Republican Party is directly responsible for the lion’s share of the $14.3 trillion budget deficit that they now pretend to be so vexed about. But if the debt problem is going to be solved, there will have to be a bipartisan solution. And such a solution must necessarily recognize, and remedy, the consequence of their deep high-end tax cuts and corporate tax expenditures (the budget term for tax breaks) that are responsible for at least half of the deficit problem.
The negotiations, led by Vice President Joe Biden, had been making progress. Democrats had agreed to negotiated cuts of some $2 trillion in projected spending for social programs and entitlements over the 10-year time frame under discussion – the target point of the discussion over whether to raise the nation’s current debt ceiling before the early August deadline. But to keep some of burden for deficit reduction off working families and ordinary wage-earners, the Democrats rightly had to seek some revenue measures and cutbacks in tax expenditures. That’s when Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, threw a fit and walked out. His colleague, Sen. John Kyl, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, obligingly followed him.
Cantor’s tantrum scene was a set piece of political calculation. He knows the hard-right Tea Party types in the House who are wagging the Republicans’ tail have become fixed in their notion that there must be no compromise toward the idea of mixing revenue-raising measures with the spending cuts they are demanding.
This is so unrealistic as to be mind-boggling, however. The $1.3 trillion cost of the Bush II wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were always funded “off-budget” as “emergency” costs to camouflage the deficit spending, but they were put on the taxpayers’ credit card nonetheless, as was the war cost in the pipeline left to President Obama.