May 7, 2009

Real Budget Cuts: A Job for the Axe, Not the Scalpel

Believe it or not, the hardest part about writing a column is unwriting it. Allow me to explain.

It’s easy to blather at the keyboard for 1,100 words or so. But it’s a real challenge to get that prattle down to around 650 words – and editing often takes three times as long as pontificating.

Generally, I start the trimming by excising a word here, a clause there, a phrase elsewhere. But soon I find that to get a piece really down to size, I have to cut out an entire paragraph or even a whole section . . . usually one I thought was especially brilliant and essential to the flow, but which on reflection was fully superfluous and even counterproductive. (No comments from those who think my columns are in and of themselves superfluous.)

The result, unsurprisingly, is a better column. At least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

So when I saw that Barack Obama was investing big bucks – $13.7 billion – in thousands of budget cops to combat waste, fraud and abuse in Social Security disability and unemployment, I thought to myself, well, maybe Sleek Barry really is serious about his promised editing job: “Going through the budget line-by-line.”

There was even commentary in the coverage of the “Nixon-to-China” aspect of the whole exercise. It takes a tender liberal to come down tough on a poor, downtrodden disability recipient or the unfortunate unemployed.

But here’s the problem: Just like cutting a column down, you don’t bring a government down to size by denying a disability case here or siccing the feds on a little unemployment fraud there, especially since the effort won’t last long once the sob stories from South Succotash start hitting the media. Not to mention that you’ll have bureaucrats wasting half their time pushing papers to prove the validity of their efforts, meaning you’ll eventually need more bureaucrats to get the job done.

No, a little trimming won’t do much to slim down the federal leviathan. Like an overwritten column, you gotta hack out big chunks. In this case, entire programs. Whole agencies. Even complete departments.

We’re not talking scalpels here. We’re talking axes. Or maybe a few dirty bombs. Evacuate the personnel, then leave the buildings standing afterwards – for future use, perhaps, as warehouses or roller skating rinks when the radiation wears off in a half century or so.

And what will the result be of all this pruning? You got the analogy – a better, more focused government.

By the way, the GOP missed this opportunity all the years they were in power. Take the Department of Education – launched as a political sop to teachers’ unions by the Carter Administration, and amply hackable in the Reagan years before it had put down roots. Still standing 20 years later, DOE provided the platform for the No Bureaucrat Left Behind Act that represented the ultimate incursion into local control of education.

Likewise, the Legal Services Corporation – whose job of providing the poor with lawyers can be handled perfectly well by those ambulance chasers advertising on cable TV – actually was slated for destruction. But the agency survived, diminished in size and mission and burrowed in like a cockroach.

Now, Democratic senators are gearing up to restore not only its 1981 funding, adjusted for inflation, but also the ability of federally financed mini law firms to extort private businesses with class-action lawsuits – plus sue governments for fun and profit.

So how is the president doing on his real editing job, writ large? Not so large.

The first line-by-line swing through the budget for actual programmatic cuts, as opposed to mere cops, came up with a whopping $100 million – which the Heritage Foundation pointed out was approximately 0.0029 percent of this year’s record budget request.

Clearly, Bo the Portuguese Water Dog ate the president’s homework. Or at least that should be the story he sticks to.