In my last blog, I raised the question of what is magic about the 100 billion dollar figure Tea Party Republicans compelled their establishment Republican cousins to insist be cut from the current year’s budget. I would still love to hear an answer to that question that had any basis in sound economic or political policy.
What I didn’t do in that blog was look very hard at the specific things the Republicans would do in order to reach that magic number. Thought perhaps we could do that now.
First, and not surprisingly, there are several things the Republican bill doesn’t do. It doesn’t propose reducing the budget deficit by raising revenue. There is nothing in the bill that would force corporations to actually pay the corporate tax rate; nor is there anything that would force any individual—even the wealthiest 1% of us—to up their ante. The Warren Buffett’s of the country—as he once famously pointed out—will continue to pay a lower percentage of their income than their secretaries.
The defense industry will not suffer. Spending for the military is nearly sacrosanct in the Republican bill. The only exception of note is the cancellation of the “second engine” program for the Air Force’s newest—and already unnecessary—fighter plane.
Agribusiness, particularly ethanol manufacturers and suppliers, won’t be asked to help our with deficit reduction. Their huge subsidies will remain virtually unchanged.
Likewise, the health insurance industry gets a pass. The absurd subsidies to insurers handed out by Bush’s Medicare Part D program will continue apace. That of course is a boon to Big Pharma as well, as is the fact that the bill passes on the opportunity to allow Medicare to bargain directly with pill makers, which could reduce Medicare’s outlay on drugs by as much as half.
If you’re beginning to see a pattern here—that no sacrifice will be asked of those portions of the economy that traditionally bankroll the Republican party—congratulate yourself for not needing glasses.
So where is that 100 billion dollars in cuts going to come from? Equally unsurprisingly, from what conservative pundits are fond of snarkily describing as the “low hanging fruit.” Such as?
How about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? Republicans have been after it for almost its entire existence, objecting primarily to what the party sees as public radio’s “leftist” agenda. One has to keep in mind of course that to the David Koch’s and Adolph Coors’ of the world, leftist is defined as anything west of Attila the Hun. Never mind that probably 85% of public radio’s broadcast schedule consists of music for those of us not infatuated with Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, and such clearly insidious programs as What Do You Know or Prairie Home Companion. There is that hour of news in the morning and again in the afternoon where the choice of stories doesn’t pass muster with Rush or Sean or Glenn.
What would shutting down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting accomplish? Well, it would save a few hundred million—hardly a drop in the bucket much less a drop in the ocean that is the 1.3 trillion dollar deficit—and hey, you have to start somewhere. It would also throw a few thousand people out of work, but since the Republicans see no correlation between unemployment and government budget shortfalls, that’s nothing to worry about.
Then there’s Planned Parenthood, another long-standing target of conservative/Republican animosity. Its sin of course is that, in addition to providing testing for breast, cervical and testicular cancer, pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, and menopause, it also provides pregnancy counseling, comprehensive sex education, birth control counseling and, gasp, abortion counseling. This last, incidentally, accounts for roughly 3% of visits to Planned Parenthood clinics.
What will cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood accomplish? Well, it probably won’t make the organization go away—government money only accounts for about a third of its operating budget. What it will do is reduce the availability of its services, probably by more than one third. And though it’s impossible to predict exact numbers, that cutback in services will unquestionably lead to more instances where breast cancer, for example, is not discovered until it’s already in an advanced stage—meaning more Medicaid and Medicare money will be needed to treat it; it will certainly lead to more teen pregnancies with all the attendant increases in both medical and social welfare costs that entails; and it will lead to more abortions, which the right so desperately wishes to eliminate. Perhaps more problematic, it wmight well lead to more abortions done in back rooms with coat hangers.
I don’t have access to the numbers that would allow a reasonable projection as to how much it will cost to severely restrict Planned Parenthood services, but the government’s 2008 contribution to the program was 349.6 million, so even if none of the costs listed above are factored in, cutting Planned Parenthood funding is roughly akin to removing a bucket full of sand from the Mojave desert.
Full disclosure before I go further: I spent most of my adult life working in the arts. Not a surprise then that I zeroed in quickly on the Republican plan to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. Again, Republican antipathy towards the NEA (the arts in general, one might argue) has a long history. One of Ronald Reagan’s first policy initiatives in 1981 was to eliminate the agency. In 1994, Newt Gingrich led another attack.
So what are we talking about here? The current year budget for the NEA is 155 million dollars. President Obama’s proposed (not passed) 2011 budget called for increasing that to 161 million, so what we aren’t talking about is huge money.
The majority of the NEA’s budget goes to state arts commissions in the form of block grants. Each state then uses that money to support its own local arts organizations—everything from library programs to art museums to what might be called indigenous music, dance and theatre companies. What’s important to note here is that Republican opposition to the NEA has mostly been based on religio/cultural grounds. The litmus test for Republicans and religious conservatives has been that no art or artists whose work can’t be read, displayed or performed in a church should be supported. What Republicans have consistently ignored is that 90% of the decisions about where and on what NEA money should be spent are made at the state level.
Be that as it may, what would cutting NEA funding do? As with Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, what it wouldn’t do is save enough money to talk about. What it would do is significantly impact, in an adverse way, library programs, museum programs, and community based arts outreach programs. More ominously, it would devastate regional theatre, dance and music companies which depend heavily on government grants for their existence.
Kind of an interesting side note here. The current NEA budget is just about exactly the same as the budget for the Canada Council on the Arts—despite the fact that Canada has a population roughly one tenth the size of America’s.
Lest you get the impression I’m only singling out the social/cultural programs being cut by the Republicans, please recall that in my last blog I noted their intention to virtually eliminate all the mortgage assistance programs, the effect of which will be at least 100,000 foreclosures this year that could have been avoided.
We could also mention other job-killing—and potentially, future killing—cuts. The Rebublican budget for example would cut the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy—which is designed to provide seed funding for the most innovative and transformative alternative energy projects—by 75%, essentially shutting it down. The Office of Science, which funds early-stage energy innovation, would be cut by 20%. The Office of Nuclear Energy, which devoted 41% of its budget to energy innovation projects, would be cut by 23%. Lost as a result of those cuts will be not only all the jobs associated with both the research and manufacturing aspects of the various projects, but any edge in the future of energy generation the country might have gained from them. How much would be saved? Less than 3 billion.
And this doesn’t even touch on the cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and virtually every other regulatory agency tasked with protecting workers and consumers from corporations. What jumps off the page of the Republican budget proposal is the party’s gleeful seizing of the legitimate problem of a huge federal budget deficit to gut every program it has historically opposed. The effect of many of these cuts on reducing the deficit will be largely offset by increased costs in other government programs, and by major loss of tax revenue due to increased unemployment and shrinking economic growth.
Here’s the bottom line. The indiscriminate cutting of programs entirely within the “discretionary spending” portion of the federal budget that Republicans propose, according to a Moody’s analysis, will eliminate 700,000 jobs from the private sector. A similar, or greater number of job losses are estimated in the public sector. A Goldman Sachs analyis of the Republican proposed budget says it will shave two full points off of economic growth for 2011. Since growth has been projected at only 2.7%, the Republican proposal would result in essentially a flat economy—and a double-dip into recession.
And all for what? So the most knuckle-dragging elements of the Republican base can pat itself on the back for “getting government’s hands out of my pocket.” What these folks don’t seem to realize is that they’re making sure most of us won’t have anything in our pockets for the government to take.
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