Federal spending decreases

Opinion: April 7, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

It’s not ideal but funding the federal government two or three weeks at a time is cutting spending by about $2 billion a week. In a little over a month, the federal government will have been trimmed as much as President Obama offered to cut for the year.

Stay this course, and there could be savings of about $62 billion, right around the amount House Republicans wanted in HR1, their budget to see the government through the current fiscal year. That’s real money, though as one GOP staffer rightly points out, it’s still like cutting 4 bucks from a $1,000 deficit. (And Democrats can barely find four bits to trim.)

Still, these are the first actual cuts in memory. Even Ronald Reagan was only able to slow the growth of welfare state spending.

As William Voegeli writes in “Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State,” “For welfare state spending to have grown less than 1 percent a year for eight years was an exceptional achievement ... but it is still a positive number. Reagan’s ‘triumph’ was to yield ground more slowly than any other political leader in the battle that conservatives consider their central mission.”

More than nibble

Today’s fiscal conservatives want to do more than nibble away at trillion-dollar deficits.

“I was sent to Congress to cut wasteful Washington spending,” U.S. Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., told me last week. “While I voted for the first two continuing resolutions, I’m not going to continue to support that approach forever. ...

“We need certainty in the current fiscal year, and we need to begin budgeting for next fiscal year, and we need to start now.”

Why the uncertainty for a fiscal year that’s almost halfway done?

Because last year the Democrats, in control of the House, the Senate and the White House, refused to pass a budget. They knew that angry voters were about to punish them for their spendthrift ways and they didn’t have the courage to say their solution to runaway debt and deficits was even more debt and deficits.

“To not do that budget was wrong,” says Pat Meehan, R-Pa., who, like Fitzpatrick, was elected in November.

In contrast to that “failure to look the American people in the eye,” Meehan says, the present House took its duties seriously and passed HR1. The Senate and White House, however, keep stalling.

The Democratic-controlled Senate rejected HR1. So Obama tapped Vice President Biden to lead 2011 budget negotiations. The president’s budget for next year was at least bipartisan — neither side of the aisle took it seriously. Thus, the short-term spending bills, which Meehan says show “progress” on spending, but don’t go nearly far enough. The 54 House Republicans who voted against the most recent continuing resolution would agree. Many of them believe it’s time to confront Senate Democrats and produce a real budget — even if that risks a showdown.

“I don’t think there’s anybody I’ve spoken to in the House that wants to shut the government down,” Meehan says. “But there are certainly a number of people who are concerned they’re not being taken seriously. If there are no meaningful negotiations, it’s going to be hard to get some folks to agree to another continuing resolution.”

On principle, they’re right. But if Democrats won’t budge, there might have to be more short-term spending bills. Not ideal, but better than a shutdown like the one that burned the GOP in the Clinton era.

And there’s another good reason to finish the 2011 budget without a meltdown: the 2012 budget will be even harder, with a likely fight over Social Security and Medicare reforms.

Kevin Ferris is assistant editor of the Editorial Page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.