by IBD
Mar. 2, 2010

Deficits: Call him crazy, but the senator is revealing the hypocrisy of Congress’ pay-as-you-go promises. It seems there’s always an “emergency” to justify adding another $10 billion or so in red ink.

We’ll say this about Kentucky’s Jim Bunning: No one can accuse him of kowtowing to the polls. This week he has single-handedly blocked his Senate colleagues from extending aid to the unemployed.

His “hold” on a $10 billion stopgap spending bill has started a wave of furloughs among federal workers and threatens doctors with a deep cut in their payments under Medicare.

President Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs calls Bunning “irrational.” Fellow Republicans keep their distance. Democrats can’t get enough of his antics, which they hope will feed the perception that Republicans are heartless and none too smart.

We’ll grant that Bunning is not the most respected or persuasive advocate for fiscal responsibility. He’ll probably go down in history as a great ballplayer (he’s a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame) but a so-so, gaffe-prone senator. Critics think cutting off unemployment checks over a budget squabble is both inhumane and politically inept.

But Bunning also raises a valid point about the hypocrisy of congressional Democrats, who are already reneging on a promise to pay for new spending rather than add it to the deficit.

Last month, they passed a so-called “pay-as-you-go” (PAYGO for short) bill requiring revenues or cuts to offset the cost of any new discretionary spending.

Freeing up revenue elsewhere in the budget to pay for the $10 billion in stopgap spending would amount to a …. % cut.

It hasn’t taken long for that rule to be broken. As columnist Debra J. Saunders points out, the $15 billion jobs bill passed by the Senate last week violated PAYGO. Ditto for the bill that Bunning has blocked.

He argues that the Senate should tap some of the unspent money from last year’s stimulus bill to fund the new legislation. Majority leader Harry Reid has rejected that plan, even though — according to the Obama administration’s www.recovery.gov website — more than $500 billion in stimulus money is yet to be spent.

The Democrats’ argument for not following PAYGO comes down to strategic procrastination. They’ve left it to the last minute to keep vital programs alive and workers on the job, so there’s no time to work out a proper PAYGO solution. “This is an emergency stopgap,” said Sen. Amy Klobucher, D-Minn., as if that was all the explanation needed.

This is a clever tactic, and it’s far from new. The big spenders know that they can usually get their way by delaying the tough decisions on tradeoffs until too late, when the collateral damage of cutting programs is just too great for either party to accept. Stall long enough and the fiscal conservatives will face a choice between starving the jobless and letting the red ink rise a bit more.

Faced with those options, only a soon-to-retire senator in a mad-as-hell mood would go to the mat for budget sobriety. Call him crazy, but Bunning is all too sane in his grasp of America’s deficit problem.

 

Source: Investors

 

Editor’s Note: we would like to know what you think. dan@goldcoastchronicle.com