Crashing the Debt Celing

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

The 2011 congressional debt-ceiling deal was billed as the best possible, but it solved nothing. Now, America faces another debt ceiling.

A special commission failed to reach an acceptable agreement, so a "sequester" provision — requested by President Barack Obama to roll what he believed to be an irresolute House majority — kicked in. But sequestration merely flattened the trajectory of government’s unsustainable spending.

One positive from the 2011 deal is that Congress exorcized the ghost of economist John Maynard Keynes, whose big-government spending theories deepened and prolonged both the Great Depression and today’s "Great Recession." Senate Democrat Dick Durbin dubbed the deal "Keynes’ final interment."

Lord Keynes is dead, but his legacy lives on in a bloated, inefficient, nonresponsive, often-corrupt government and in unsustainable or unjustifiable New Deal programs.

By building on Obama’s sequester, another debt-ceiling deal may present opportunities to make government more efficient and less costly.

The late Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Ronald Coase, observed that "government…operates on such a massive scale that it…reached the stage of what economists call negative marginal returns. Anything additional it does, it messes up. But that doesn’t mean that if we reduce [government’s] size…we wouldn’t find…that there were some activities it did well. Until we reduce the size of government, we won’t know what they are."

Washington is famous for policy excesses, overspending and waste, yet, nonsensically (and ungrammatically), U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi declared, "There’s no more cuts to make."

Rubbish.

The U.S. Dept. of Education has never taught a single child a single fact; the Transportation Department has never transported anything or anybody six inches; the Department of Agriculture’s headcount is approaching the number of real American farms; and the Energy Department, established to make it more available, makes energy less accessible and more expensive.

Most of us get nothing from and would never miss these top-heavy, overstaffed government money pits. The same is true of many other overweight, underperforming agencies.

During the government shut down, more than 800,000 civilian employees were considered nonessential, including 90% or more at the IRS, Housing and Urban Development, Education, the National Labor Relations Board and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.

To reduce costs, Congress must exercise its responsibility for spending oversight, and demand that, annually, every department in every agency make a public case for continued funding. Supervisors’ GS ratings can no longer be raised and salaries increased based on the number of employees they supervise. The practice only encourages federal managers to slow down their staffs and create artificial backlogs to increase headcount.

Simplifying and flattening the tax code would reduce IRS headcount, errors and agency abuses, while closing tax loopholes and reducing compliance costs for individuals and businesses.

Clerks are clerks, and purchasing agents and customer-service people do similar jobs everywhere, so agency staffing, salaries, benefits and workloads must be calibrated with the private-sector workers many government employees significantly out-earn.

Government agencies should outsource jobs that are not inherently governmental. Competition increases choices, drives down prices and improves services. Why pay unskilled and semiskilled laborers government-level salaries and benefits when privately-owned companies could do the same or better jobs at less cost?
The House should highlight the waste inherent in government, use the debt-ceiling debate to educate the public about the country’s debt problem and explain how to fix it. The House may not get everything it wants, but that shouldn’t rule out trying.

In fact, the government shutdown is evolving into a national debate about spending and debt, explaining the Democrats’ and liberal media’s hyperbolic, apocalyptic wailing over the "shutdown," even though the vast majority of the leviathan wasn’t shut down at all.

Despite declaring his intransigence, as in 2011, the president must negotiate.
Given the will, the House of Representatives can force American finances and our economy back from the abyss.

Fiscal conservatives believe the House GOP to be a new class of invertebrates, several of whom represent Central Pennsylvania, but, whatever you think of them, although Republicans control only one-half of one-third of the government, some of them have shifted the debate in Washington, if not the immediate reality, from taxing and spending to cutting and capping.

Since Obama took office, the debt limit has been raised seven times, adding $43,000 in debt for every American household, yet Obama said, laughably: "Raising the debt ceiling…does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy."

History shows it does both — and it’s not a ceiling if they keep raising it.
http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/10/crashing_through_the_debt_ceiling_then_what_jerry_shenk.html#incart_flyout_opinion