David Brooks offers some useful insights on the public spending debates now raging at every level of government. Here in Wisconsin, another school day has been cancelled due to work actions by public teachers, and public employees at every level of government are storming the capitol to protest the dramatic increases in benefit costs and elimination of almost all of their collective bargaining abilities. The NEA is on the cutback block, as well, as are state arts agencies (pdf file) and public arts funding from coast to coast.
They assume that if they can only persuade enough people that their programs are producing tremendous results then they will be spared from the budget ax…. They are wrong about that. The coming budget cuts have nothing to do with merit. They have to do with the inexorable logic of mathematics.
The increasing majority of public spending now goes to programs that feel off-limits to anyone who wants to be re-elected — entitlement programs, defense, and such. Which means, Brooks suggests, that “all cuts must, therefore, be made in the tiny sliver of the budget where the most valuable programs reside and where the most important investments in our future are made.” So, it’s not necessarily that the programs up for cuts aren’t successful (at least, according to the rhetoric), they’re just swimming in the tiny ‘discretionary spending’ puddle that’s politically expedient to cut.
This “math” only exists for things they want to cut. Try applying “math” to the tax cuts for the wealthy that were just forced on us.
Thank you for having the courage to post an article by a conservative writer on an artsblog. Perhaps it will help encourage actual useful conversation where we value what each side has to say rather than just our normal yelling matches. Tough choices to be made in this current (and future) economic climate – and it does no good reducing things to arguments based purely on our political biases.
While I agree that tax cuts for the rich are ludicrous, David’s point about the budgetary “pie” are still accurate; certain “untouchable” items are taking up a greater percentage of the pie, leaving less for the rest. His point has merit; instead of trying to argue that certain items shouldn’t be cut because they are important, we should work to lower the the needs of the “untouchable” programs to make more available for other programs.
Eliminating the entire non-defense, discretionary side of the government (arts, health, education, housing, roads, energy, on and on) would cut only half this year’s budget deficit. That’s the real math. We can’t cut our way out of debt, only out of having a government that does much of anything at all.