Have you seen the official White House version of what the New Yorkimes
headline writers call “A Responsible Budget”?
My favorite bit is Chart
5-1 on page 58 of their 500-page appendix on “Analytical Perspectives.”
This is entitled “Publicly Held Debt Under 2013 Budget Policy
Projections.” It’s a straight lin e going straight up before
disappearing off the top right-hand corner of the graph in the year 2084
and continuing northeast straight through your eye socket, out the back
of your skull, and zooming up to rendezvous with Newt’s space colony on
the moon circa 2100. Just to emphasize, this isn’t the doom-laden
dystopian fancy of a right-wing apocalyptic loon like me; it’s the
official Oval Office version of where America’s headed. In the New York Times–approved
“responsible budget” there is no attempt even to pretend to bend the
debt curve into something approaching reentry with reality.
As for us doom-mongers, at the House Budget Committee on Thursday,
Chairman Paul Ryan produced another chart, this time from the
Congressional Budget Office, with an even steeper straight line showing
debt rising to 900 percent of GDP and rocketing off the graph circa
2075. America’s Treasury Secretary, Timmy Geithner the TurboTax Kid,
thought the chart would have been even more hilarious if they’d run the
numbers into the next millennium: “You could have taken it out to 3000
or to 4000” he chortled, to supportive titters from his aides. Has total
societal collapse ever been such a non-stop laugh riot?
“Yeah, right. We cut it off at the end of the
century because the economy, according to the CBO, shuts down in 2027 on
this path.”
-Paul Ryan to Tim Geithner
The U.S. economy shuts down in 2027? Had you heard about that? It’s
like the ultimate Presidents’ Day sale: Everything must go — literally!
Soph: Here's some more of that exchange: Every American should be made to watch this until they can recite both parts backwards.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner spar over debt. Transcript below:
Ryan: Here's the point, if you'll allow me. This is your time, so we'll just take a long time. Here's the point. Leaders are supposed to fix problems. We have a $99.4 trillion unfunded liability. Our government is making promises to Americans that it has no way of accounting for them. And so you're saying yeah, we're stabilizing it but we're not fixing it in the long run. That means we're just going to keep lying to people. We're going to keep all these empty promises going.
Ryan: Here's the point, if you'll allow me. This is your time, so we'll just take a long time. Here's the point. Leaders are supposed to fix problems. We have a $99.4 trillion unfunded liability. Our government is making promises to Americans that it has no way of accounting for them. And so you're saying yeah, we're stabilizing it but we're not fixing it in the long run. That means we're just going to keep lying to people. We're going to keep all these empty promises going.
And so what we're saying is, in order to avert a debt crisis -- you're
the Treasury Secretary -- if we can't make good on our bonds in the
future, who is going to invest in our country? We do not want to have a
debt crisis. And so it comes down to confidence and trajectory. Do we
have confidence that we're getting our fiscal situation under control,
that we're preventing the debt from getting at these catastrophic
levels?
If we go back to the preceding chart, number 13, you're showing that you
have no plan to get this debt under control. You're saying we'll
stabilize it but then it's just going to shoot back up. So my argument
is, that's Europe. That is bringing us toward a European debt crisis
because we're showing the world, the credit market's future seniors --
people who are organizing their lives around the promises that are being
made to them today -- that we don't have a plan to make good on this.
Geithner: Mr. Chairman, as I said, maybe we're not disagreeing in a sense. I made it absolutely clear that what our budget does is get out deficit down to a sustainable path over the budget window.
Geithner: Why do they take off again? Why do they do that?
Ryan: Because we have 10,000 people retiring everyday and healthcare costs going up.
Geithner:
"That's right. We have millions of Americans retiring everyday,
and that will drive substantial further rise in the growth of
healthcare costs. We're not coming before you to say we have a
definitive solution to our long-term problem. What we do know is we
don't like yours."
[Soph: Allow me to translate Tax Cheat Timmy for you:
"That's right. We have 10,000 Americans becoming newly eligible for Social Security and Medicare everyday in America and that number will continue on through the end of the 2020s. We recognise that what many of the hardliners on the fiscal right have been saying is true and the entitlement programmes are unsustainable. Simply raising taxes on the 1% might close less than 10% of President Obama's next budget deficit. We aren't suppose to articulate the problem that arises when the demographic foundations upon which the New Deal and The Great Society were founded breakdown. Simply put, there are too few children to support their aging parents and, as a society, we decided it was the government's role to take care of the elderly not the parents anyway. That was how all great Social Democratic states in Europe did. Why should millions of Frenchmen be made to abandon their 6 week vacations in August of 2003? The state was supposed to care for their homebound parents without air conditioning in one of the greatest heatwaves in a century. Il n'était pas la responsabilité des enfants! Non! Sadly, there are not enough children to pay the taxes to take care of the adults, who chose not to have beaucoup enfants in France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Germany, or elsewhere. All of the programmes are unsustainable. We know that. But, we would rather get reelected and paper over the disaster in the hope that we can leave the disaster for the next President, who will likely be a Republican and will be hated for having to dismantle all of our fine social safety net programmes and doom his party to hell for an eternity.]
At such a moment, it may seem odd to find the political class embroiled
in a bitter argument about the Obama administration’s determination to
force Catholic institutions (and, indeed, my company and your company,
if you’re foolish enough still to be in business in the United States)
to provide free prophylactics to their employees. The received wisdom
among media cynics is that Obama has engaged in an ingenious bit of
misdirection by seizing on a pop-culture caricature of Republicans and
inviting them to live up to it: Those uptight squares with the hang-ups
about fornication have decided to force you to lead the same cheerless
sex lives as them. I notice that in their coverage NPR and the evening
news shows generally refer to the controversy as being about
“contraception,” discreetly avoiding mention of sterilization and
pharmacological abortion, as if the GOP have finally jumped the shark in
order to prevent you jumping anything at all.
It may well be that the Democrats succeed in establishing this
narrative. But anyone who falls for it is a sap. In fact, these two
issues — the Obama condoms-for-clunkers giveaway and a debt-to-GDP ratio
of 900 percent by 2075 — are not unconnected. In Greece, 100
grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., an upside-down family tree.
As I wrote in this space a few weeks ago, “If 100 geezers run up a
bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will
ever be able to pay it off?” Most analysts know the answer to that
question: Greece is demographically insolvent. So it’s looking to
Germany to continue bankrolling its First World lifestyle.
But the Germans are also demographically exhausted: They have the
highest proportion of childless women in Europe. One in three fräulein
have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. A nation that did
without having kids of its own is in no mood to maintain Greece as the
ingrate slacker who never moves out of the house. As the European debt
crisis staggers on, these two countries loathe each other ever more
nakedly: The Greek president brings up his war record against the German
bullies, and Athenian commentators warn of the new Fourth Reich. The
Germans, for their part, would rather cut the Greeks loose. In a
post-prosperity West, social solidarity — i.e., socioeconomic fictions
such as “Europe” — are the first to disappear.
The United States faces a mildly less daunting arithmetic.
Nevertheless, the Baby Boomers did not have enough children to maintain
mid-20th-century social programs. As a result, the children they did
have will end their lives in a poorer, uglier, sicker, more divided, and
more violent society. How to avert this fate? In 2009 Nancy Pelosi
called for free contraceptives as a form of economic stimulus. Ten
thousand Americans retire every day, and leave insufficient progeny to
pick up the slack. In effect, Nancy has rolled a giant condom over the
entire American economy.
Testifying before Congress, Timmy Geithner referred only to “demographic
challenges” — an oblique allusion to the fact that the U.S. economy is
about to be terminally clobbered by $100 trillion of entitlement
obligations it can never meet. And, as Chart 5-1 on page 58 of the
official Obama budget “Analytical Perspectives” makes plain, your
feckless, decadent rulers have no plans to do anything about it.
Instead, the Democrats shriek, Ooh, Republican prudes who can’t get any
action want to shut down your sex life! According to CBO projections, by
mid-century mere interest payments on the debt will exceed federal
revenues. For purposes of comparison, by 1788 Louis XVI’s government in
France was spending a mere 60 percent of revenues on debt service, and
we know how that worked out for His Majesty shortly thereafter. Not to
worry, says Barry Antoinette. Let them eat condoms.
This is a very curious priority for a dying republic. “Birth control”
is accessible, indeed ubiquitous, and, by comparison with anything from
a gallon of gas to basic cable, one of the cheapest expenses in the
average budget. Not even Rick Santorum, that notorious scourge of the
sexually liberated, wishes to restrain the individual right to
contraception.
But where is the compelling societal interest in the state prioritizing and subsidising
it? Especially when you’re already the Brokest Nation in History.
Elsewhere around the developed world, prudent politicians are advocating
natalist policies designed to restock their empty maternity wards. A
few years ago, announcing tax incentives for three-child families, Peter
Costello, formerly Timmy Geithner’s counterpart Down Under, put it this
way: “Have one for Mum, one for Dad, and one for Australia.” But in
America an oblivious political class, led by a president who
characterizes young motherhood as a “punishment,” prefers to offer
solutions to problems that don’t exist rather than the ones that are all
too real. I think this is what they call handing out condoms on the Titanic.
Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit,
distills the current hysteria thus: “It’s as if we passed a law
requiring mosques to sell bacon and then, when people objected,
responded by saying ‘What’s wrong with bacon? You’re trying to ban bacon!!!!’”
Americans foolish enough to fall for the Democrats’ crude bit of
misdirection can hardly complain about their rendezvous with the sharp
end of that page-58 budget graph. People are free to buy bacon, and free
to buy condoms. But the state has no compelling interest to force
either down your throat. The notion that an all-powerful government
would distract from its looming bankruptcy by introducing a universal
contraceptive mandate would strike most novelists as almost too pat in
its symbolism. It’s like something out of Brave New World. Except that it’s cowardly, and, like so much else about the sexual revolution, very old and wrinkled.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
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