FEBRUARY 17, 2010, 10:38 P.M. ET.
It's the Spending, America
With voter anger at federal profligacy and states teetering on the verge of financial collapse, the moment is ripe for an historic reordering of American politics.
By DANIEL HENNINGER.
Anyone who isn't welded to the Obama-Pelosi-Reid ball and chain has their campaign issue for November's election and 2012: spending.
Republicans, Lieberman-Bayh Democrats, tea partiers, it doesn't matter. Spending, spending, spending. This is bigger than drill, drill, drill. Way bigger.
Finally, after a nonstop, nearly 80-year upward climb, government spending has hit a wall. It didn't seem possible but this is a big wall. It's the American voter.
This has been an unforgettable year in the history of American spending.
It began with an eye-popping $800 billion stimulus bill that came from nowhere and went to nowhere. Done with that, the Washington Democrats turned to President Obama's health-care reform, which looked big at first, but turned out to be bigger. A well-publicized June estimate of the Senate bill's cost by the Congressional Budget Office put the 10-year price tag at $1.6 trillion. So $800 billion, then a trillion.
Dollar signs rocketed into the sky all year: hundreds of billions on various TARP salvage projects, much drawn from some magic stash held by the Federal Reserve. The Obama cap-and-trade bill was going to use an auction to siphon $3.3 trillion from various states to Washington over 40 years. Oh, almost forgot—an FY 2011 $3.8 trillion budget.
Some of this was spending, some taxes, some fees. It's all spending. A tax or fee is just a sluice gate that separates private income from the public-spending lake. And in 2009 it was beginning to look as if the politicians were going to blow the dam.
California and New York, the nation's first and third most populous states, were in fiscal collapse, with the whole nation watching as once-mighty California (which looks like Greece cubed) actually issued IOUs.
On April 15, the tea parties achieved critical mass, then built into a political phenomenon. The New York Times this week gave two full pages to cataloguing tea partier grievances in a way meant to convey the paranoid style in American politics. But if whatever you're doing causes even little old ladies in tennis shoes to hit the ramparts waving copies of the Constitution, Washington, you've got a problem.
In November, voters in Virginia and New Jersey flipped their states out of the Obama column. Then this January voters in Massachusetts ended the Kennedys' 57-year ownership of a U.S. Senate seat.
The message of Massachusetts, of the tea parties, of Evan Bayh and the other retirements in Congress, and of the palpable disaffection of voters in states like California, New York and New Jersey is that the moment is ripe for an historic reordering of American politics.
All the anxiety coursing through the country now is over the scale, size and scope of government, in Washington or where people live, in the states. The issue that Barack Obama's presidency has put squarely before the American people is how big is too big? How much is too much?
This central question is emerging in the unlikeliest of places, such as Massachusetts, our latest cradle of liberty. But also in hopelessly profligate New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie just announced a freeze on unspent monies. Finding precisely the right metaphor, Gov. Christie said, "The days of Alice in Wonder Land budgeting in Trenton end."
That's been said before, and the politicians burrow in like sand crabs until the tides sweep public anger out to sea. It looks different this time. In hopelessly profligate New York, for instance, a coalition of diverse business interests formed recently after concluding that the state's politicians and public unions are willing to wreck what's left of the state's long-term economic prospects. Better late than never.
We've been grinding toward this moment since 1932. It has always been a question of political physics just how high government could go in the U.S. before it arched over and down. Now we have Washington, California, New York, New Jersey and others all arriving at the same time of reckoning. And all for the same reason, public spending by the public sector—its politicians, its unions, its massive schools of pilot fish.
The discomforts of the tea parties and the rest of the electorate are obviously more complex than the details of federal or state budget accounts. But the 80-year-old blob knows—and has proven—that it cannot be replaced by 50 varieties of political anxiety.
Look at what the just-discovered nest of White House deficit hawks is doing. It will hold a "bipartisan" health-care summit next week, and today it announces the oxymoronic National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The goal of both is to find new sources of revenue oxygen for the blob.
You need one big club to beat the blob into a size appropriate for what we still call the United States. Barack Obama's first year, with California and New York, have handed that club to the voters and their candidates: It's the spending, America.
Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Mr. Henninger joined Dow Jones in 1971 as a staff writer for the National Observer. He became an editorial-page writer for the Journal in 1977, arts editor in 1978 and editorial features editor in 1980. He was appointed assistant editor of the editorial page in 1983 and chief editorial writer and senior assistant editor in October 1986, with daily responsibility for the "Review & Outlook" columns. In November 1989 he became deputy editor of the editorial page.
Mr. Henninger was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing in 1987 and 1996, and shared in the Journal's Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of the attacks on September 11. In 2004, he won the Eric Breindel Journalism Award for his "Wonder Land" column. He won the Gerald Loeb Award for commentary in 1985. In 1998 he received the Scripps Howard Foundation's Walker Stone Award for editorial writing, for editorials on a range of issues, including the International Monetary Fund, presidential politics and cloning. He won the 1995 American Society of Newspaper Editors' Distinguished Writing Award for editorial writing, and he was a finalist in that award in 1985, 1986 and 1993. A native of Cleveland, Mr. Henninger graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor's degree from the School of Foreign Service.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario