Federal budget

(originally posted on The Will and the Wallet

For thirty-five years, the Egyptian people believed the myth and lived in fear, fear of the security forces and fear of the chaos and instability that might exist without a strong ruler.  They have just overcome that fear and created hope.   That collective psychic shift was the key to making the change they needed to bring about.

Some people, like Ezra Klein, think the taxes/unemployment agreement pending before the Congress this week amply demonstrates that "no one [including the Congress] really cares about the deficit," since the package will add roughly $900 billion to the deficit over the next couple of years. Maybe some people are right. Members of Congress have rarely been reluctant to push a pet spending rock when the opportunity presented itself and this agreement is expensive.

But this was a peculiar kind of opportunity – the last gasp of an outgoing Congress. Easy to blame them, when next year rolls around. But when the posturing stops this week and the last Congress slinks out of town, the last month will have been memorable for the way it changed the atmosphere around deficits, particularly with respect to defense.

The Presidential debt commission co-chairs (Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson) decided to move forward yesterday and present the package they want the commission to discuss over the next two weeks.  In defense, it is a striking package, with a great deal of merit and no small amount of courage in tow.  It also has one critical weakness, which I will come to.

The package puts defense squarely on the table in the overall effort to reduce the deficit and get the debt under control.  It lays out a very detailed set of options, including procurement savings from terminating or cutting back on major programs (like the V-22 and the F-35), a 3-year military and civlian pay freeze, and a variety of efficiency savings, many of which have been advanced for years by the Congressional Budget Office.

In a Washington Post opinion piece today, Danielle Pletka and Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute, arch-defenders, perhaps the last flame carriers of the neo-conservative vision, open fire on those voices in the Republican Party who think we need some restraint in runaway defense budgets as part of getting our fiscal house in order. 

A circular firing squad is always fun to watch, but the deceptive way in which Pletka and Donnelly manipulate evidence deserves a response.  Items:

Let's start with a quick walk down federal budget memory lane.  

It used to be that getting a copy of the president’s budget as soon as possible after it was released was a painful, multi-step, difficult, and time-consuming process. 

First, I had to make sure I was on the list to pick up the (depending on the year) five to seven books (2000 or so pages) at the Government Printing Office. Then I had to get myself to GPO early on the day the budget was released, get on line, wait for about an hour in what usually was cold weather, and then buy and haul the budget back to my office. It was expensive – $100 or more. Cabs were often difficult to find near GPO, the books were heavy and cumbersome, and I typically tried to look at a few tables on the way back to the office to get a head start on an already tough day that was going to get tougher.