How come 47 beat-up states can pare their budgets in bad times, but the bloated federal government can't?
All the supercommittee had to do is find 3 percent in deficit savings over 10 years. That's $1.2 trillion of a $44 trillion federal budget.
Three percent.
Three percent is a number millions of American families slash from their personal budgets over the kitchen table and many states have worked to find every year since the economy began bottoming out.
Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said in a prepared statement, "... it is nothing short of an embarrassment, an absolute national disgrace and failure of leadership that we could not agree on even a paltry $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over (10 years)."
Yes, it is.
According to the National Association of State Budget Offices, since December 2007, 24 states have cut government spending by an average of 7.5 percent after adjusting for inflation.
The point is this: Battered as they are, state budgetmakers continue to show the way. Have a look at the attachment at the bottom of this column from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Cuts enacted since 2008 in at least 46 states plus the District of Columbia have occurred in all major areas of services, including health care (31 states), services to the elderly and disabled (29 states and the District of Columbia), K-12 education (34 states and the District of Columbia), higher education (43 states), and many other areas.
While the states largely continue to make the tough choices, the federal government does not.
Defense spending is perhaps the biggest example of congressional sacred cowism.
The Pentagon budget is still continuing to go up, said Laura Peterson, who follows the defense budget for Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington watchdog group.
- Even with the planned troop drawdown in Afghanistan, the size of the military abroad -- 1.4 million men and women in uniform and an estimated 800,000 civilian personnel will remain essentially unchanged next year.
- There's a planned 1.6 percent pay increase for service personnel in fiscal 2012.
- Another major increase in defense spending is on medical research, much of it earmarked for cancer cure investigations virtually unrelated to military-specific health problems.
Why no cuts to defense?
It's an election year. Who wants to be perceived as weak on national security?
Who wants to challenge outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who plants his doom-and-gloom flag sqarely on the field of defense cuts? Never mind the gross escalation of the defense budget in the past decade.
Who wants to threaten military industrial projects scheduled for their districts? None of those projects, incidentally, will get the let's-give-it-the-smell-test-before-we-toss-it-into-the-budget treatment.
The absurdity of the super committee's failure is this: By doing nothing, Congress will cut $6 trillion in debt. Thanks to their past shenanigans, our reps in Washington have set mechanisms in place that would both slash spending and raise taxes automatically.
Failure to act by the end of the year means huge tax cuts put in place as temporary in George W. Bushs first term will expire. That will account for paying off $4 trillion of the debt.
Sounds great, right? It isn't.
It represents disgraceful leadership, chaos, virtually the imposition of taxes and a failure to govern by sound policy decisions.
Meanwhile, we have lawmakers in beleaguered, hard-pressed states like Florida -- in fact, in states all across the country -- making the tough decisions to balance their budgets while dodging flack from an electorate looking for nothing else but jobs and an economy that returns the American dream.
Let's hope voters this year are watching as closely as they need to.
This is an opinion column: Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.
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