After voting “no” on the debt deal Monday, thus signaling her willingness to let the nation slide into default, Rep. Diana DeGette explained that “the American people deserve a balanced solution, with reasonable cuts to spending, like agricultural and ethanol subsidies, combined with common-sense revenue enhancements, like closing tax loopholes for corporations and the ultra-rich.”
You’ve got to appreciate an urban representative who ticks off agricultural and ethanol subsidies — and nothing else — as ripe for budget cuts while confining her list of the undertaxed to corporations and the ultra-rich.
So we can balance the budget by targeting farmers, fat cats and employers? What a profile in courage.
But of course we can’t expect a few paragraphs in a press release to convey the full range of a politician’s position on deficit reduction. For that let’s turn to a column that DeGette penned for The Huffington Post last month and see if she was more realistic.
The answer is . . . barely. We learn that DeGette would like to “Hammer out a budget and deficit reduction plan on a bipartisan basis . . . [and] open every program to scrutiny, including defense, agriculture subsidies, and domestic programs.” She also wants to “Keep an eye on equity and shared sacrifice; meaning revenue must be on the table.”
If by “scrutiny” she means caps or cuts, then this is progress. But maybe it isn’t, at least in the case of domestic programs. After all, the first round of discretionary spending cuts that she rejected Monday equaled just 2.1 percent of outlays projected by the Congressional Budget Office for fiscal 2012, and just 3.9 percent in fiscal 2013. And yet she denounced the plan as “extreme,” warning it “places too great a burden on the middle class.”
Ah, but surely she recognizes that entitlements will be the main engine of future spending and thus wants to deal decisively with them. Not really. In the most astonishing passage in the piece, DeGette writes, “Do not use Social Security and Medicare to balance the programs. Recognize that they are separate trust funds which, while solvent for the next few years and decades, must be reviewed for long- term viability.” She then calls for a bipartisan commission “to review the details of those programs,” it being too much to ask, apparently, that she share a few ideas of her own.
Of course, if Medicare and Social Security were solvent for decades, perhaps we could relax. In fact, Medicare trustees predicted a few months ago that the program’s Hospital Insurance Fund will run dry in 2024. No wonder President Obama, speaking to reporters last month, warned, “If you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up. I mean, it’s not an option for us to just sit by and do nothing.”
As for Social Security, the trustees predicted its trust fund would be exhausted in 2036. And since that fund is a chest of IOUs (the government spent the money as it came in on other programs), the federal deficit will rise as Social Security outlays exceed incoming revenue. Washington will have to borrow even more when it starts to redeem the IOUs, long before 2036.
In a recent joint paper, Robert Greenstein of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Charles Blahous of the conservative Hoover Institution spell out what happens if the trust fund runs dry. At that point, they explain, “benefit payments would be reduced to the level that incoming tax revenues can support. According to the latest trustees’ projections, this would mean a sudden 22 percent reduction in benefits for all beneficiaries (including those already receiving benefits) in 2037.”
DeGette wasn’t the only Coloradan to vote against the debt deal. Republicans Scott Tipton and Doug Lamborn were equally reckless regarding default — and their position on deficit reduction may be no more coherent. But DeGette has long claimed the mantle of a budgetary realist, a status that has now flown out the door.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
