Deficit-Reduction
Fever
President Obama launches the war on tchotchkes.
By Mark Steyn
Have
you been following this so-called Supercommittee? They’re the new superhero
group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from
plummeting over the cliff and into the multi-trillion-dollar abyss. There’s
Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John
Kerry), and many other warriors for truth, justice, and the American way of
debt. The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before
Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and
thereby save the republic.
I
had cynically assumed that the Superfriends would address America’s imminent
debt catastrophe with some radical reform — such as, say, slowing the increase
in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility
from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to
sleep until total societal collapse.
But
I underestimated the genius of the Superfriends’ Supercommittee. It turns out
that a committee created to reduce the deficit is instead going to increase it.
As The Hill reported:
Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package, according to a summary of the $2.3 trillion plan obtained by The Hill.
Do
you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you:
The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office.
Let
us note in passing that, according to the official CBO estimates, a whole
decade’s worth of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan adds up to little more than
Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. But, aside from that, in what sense are these
“savings”? The Iraq War is ended — or, at any rate, “ended,” at least as far as
U.S. participation in it is concerned. How then can congressional accountants
claim to be able to measure “savings” in 2021 from a war that ended a decade
earlier? And why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by
2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus
package, wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be
“savings.”
Come
to think of it, didn’t the Second World War end in 1945? Could we have the CBO
score the estimated two-thirds of a century of “budget savings” we’ve saved
since ending that war? We could use the money to fund free master’s degrees in
Complacency and Self-Esteem Studies for everyone, and that would totally
stimulate the economy. The Spanish–American War ended 103 years ago, so imagine
how much cash has already piled up! Like they say at Publishers Clearing House,
you may already have won!
Meanwhile,
back at the Oval Office, the president is asking for your votes for the 2011
SAVE Award. To demonstrate his commitment to fiscal discipline, he set up a
competition whereby federal employees can propose ways to cut government waste.
A panel of experts (John Kerry, Paula Abdul, etc.) then weigh the merits, and
the four finalists go up on the White House website to be voted on by members
of the public: It’s like Dancing with the Czars. Last year, Marjorie Cook of
Michigan, a food inspector with the Department of Agriculture, noted that every
year USDA inspectors ship 125,000 food samples to its analysis labs by “next
day” express delivery, and that a day or two later the labs ship the empty
containers back to the inspectors using the very same “next day” service.
Marjorie suggested that, as the containers are empty, they can’t be all that
urgent, and should be mailed back at regular old ground delivery rates.
But
this reform was way too radical, so it didn’t win. And happily, even as we
speak, mail couriers are rushing empty containers back and forth across the
USDA-inspected fruited plain at your expense. This year’s SAVE Award nominees
include Faith Stanfield of Toledo, a “General Technical Expert” with the Social
Security Administration. As someone who’s technically expert in a very general
sense, she sees the big picture. It’s on the front of the SSA’s glossy
magazine. Did you know Social Security has its own glossy magazine? It’s called
Oasis and it’s sent out to 88,000 SSA employees plus about a thousand
government retirees. It’s like Vogue or Vanity Fair, but without the perfume
and fashion ads, because who needs Givenchy and Yves St. Laurent to fund your
mag when you’ve got the U.S. taxpayer? It’s the magazine that says you’re cool,
you’re now, you’re living the SSA-bureaucrat lifestyle. But Faith thinks they
should scrap the glossy pages and only publish it online.
Ooh,
I dunno. Sounds a bit extreme to me. Could result in hundreds of Social
Security lifestyle editors being laid off and reduced to living on Social
Security.
Anyway,
the winner of the SAVE Award gets to meet with the president to discuss his or
her proposal. The proposal then gets submitted to a committee for further
discussion on whether to set up a committee to discuss discussing it further.
But, unlike the Superfriends’ Supercommittee, the lunch expenses are cheaper.
What
with the proposal to use the nearly two centuries of budget savings from the
end of the War of 1812 to fund the construction of high-speed monorails and the
plan to turn the Social Security Administration’s in-house glossy into an
in-house virtual-glossy, it’s no surprise that the president himself has got
the deficit-reduction fever. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order
“Promoting Efficient Spending” — and ending government waste. Just like that!
According to Section Seven:
Agencies should limit the purchase of promotional items (e.g., plaques, clothing, and commemorative items), in particular where they are not cost-effective.
Sounds
like someone’s seen one amusing Janet Napolitano bobblehead too many at the DHS
holiday party. About to stick in one of those giant commemorative plaques on
the side of the road saying “These next three miles of single-lane scarified
pavement brought to you by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act”? Don’t
even think about it.
Fresh
from launching the war on tchotchkes, the administration then proposed a
15-cent tax on Christmas trees in order to fund a federal promotional campaign
to promote the sale of Christmas trees. Possibly Commerce Department research
showed that there’s a dramatic fall-off in the sale of “holiday trees” round
about December 26 every year, and Obama figured a little stimulus surely
couldn’t hurt. He was forced to rescind the proposal, presumably after an ACLU
chum pointed out that settling the Bureau of Christmas Tree Promotion lawsuit
would wipe out all the budget savings from the French and Indian Wars.
Meanwhile,
as these ruthless austerity measures start to bite, the government of the
United States continues to spend one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have
every hour, every day, every week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and
Ramadan.
And
remember, folks, Rick Perry is the dummy because he wants to abolish so many
government departments, he can’t keep track of them all. Keep it simple, Rick.
Just stick to a campaign pledge to set up a supercommittee to report back on
the possibility of using savings from mailing back empty specimen beakers by
three-day ground service to fund Medicare. Then people will take you seriously.
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