lunes, 5 de agosto de 2013

lunes, agosto 05, 2013

Editorial Commentary

SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 2013

The Long Hot Summer

By THOMAS G. DONLAN

The Capital City Releases Its Inmates

 

Here's one good reason to go on vacation in August: Your congressmen and senators leave Washington in August to come home and tell you what a great job they are doing. You really don't want to stay around for that.

On the other hand, if your summer cottage happens to be on Martha's Vineyard, there's a great reason to hold off until September: President Barack Obama will be vacationing on the island. He will be surrounded by a regiment of security men, a pride of White House aides, and a murrain of journalists. The miasma of self-importance will be thicker than the fog on Buzzards Bay.

The question of the month, therefore, is this: Why don't these people stay in Washington and get some work done? The only hopeful answer we can offer is that the federal government often functions a little better when they aren't around to run it.

Capital Train Wreck


This government, however, is getting ready to run itself into the ground. All of the 12 appropriations bills for the fiscal year that starts on Oct. 1 face legislative blockades, some because the Republican House and the Democratic Senate have different priorities and some because the House Republicans or the Senate Democrats are themselves divided. None of the 12 bills is likely to reach the president's desk by Sept. 30.

An appropriations crisis could lead to a government shutdown, but those have become so common that they no longer instill the right degree of fiscal fear. These days, Congress passes continuing resolutions to tax and spend at the previous year's pace.

Just like last year, Congress has to whip itself into a frenzy before acting. If there's no train wreck in prospect, there's no frenzy, and no action.

The solution: A new budget deadline can move the fiscal locomotive into position to run into the debt-ceiling locomotive. Throttles will open then, maybe sometime around Thanksgiving.

Nobody outside the U.S. Treasury really knows when (if ever) the Treasury will exhaust its discretion to juggle the books to avoid the legislated limit on new borrowing. After all, the letter of the law is that borrowing authority ended May 19, when the total of federal bonds, notes and bills hit $16.699 trillion. Since then, the Treasury has been using "extraordinary" cash-management measures, such as diverting the flow of payments to federal employees' retirement funds, to keep the government operating -- and paying interest on that $16.699 trillion -- without breaching the debt ceiling.

These are not merely extraordinary measures; they are measures unrestricted by law, within the discretion of the Treasury secretary. He can make up new ones until he decides he can't or won't. It's most likely Treasury Secretary Jack Yew and Congress will each pick a day right around Thanksgiving to start their locomotives rolling down the track to a big smashup. Only then will both parties' militants and maniacs get down to the real business of spending more money, borrowing more money, and raising more taxes.

The president tried to set a better tone last week with a series of speeches on the economy, although he actually spoke more about how annoying it is to put forward good ideas and have them shot down "just because I proposed them." He showed no recognition that most Republicans wouldn't like his ideas even if they were proposed by a Republican president who had taken leave of his senses.
 
Worn Out

After two years of steamrolling and nearly three years of gridlock, the president should stop talking about a "grand bargain." If he really wanted a bargain, rather than a Republican surrender, he could have picked one from the prix-fixe menus proffered by various commissions of Washington chefs: Simpson-Bowles, Rivlin-Domenici and the Senate Gangs of Six and Eight, to name a few of the famous ones. Instead, Obama preferred to order a la carte, and he was surprised to find the kitchen wouldn't deliver his choices.

Nothing, it seems, can stop the president from demanding his way. In his speaking tour he has been trying to heat up the debate with lines that promise a "steady, persistent effort to reverse the forces that have conspired against the middle class for decades."

The president puts too much attention on the kind of investments his federal government can make. For example, he made two trips to Florida this year to highlight the need to deepen the ports of Miami and Jacksonville.

"In a couple of years, new supertankers are going to start coming through the Panama Canal," Obama said in a July 25 speech in Jacksonville. "We want those supertankers coming here, to Jacksonville."

Who Pays? We Do
It's hard to be sure what he meant by "we." Any president ought to represent the national interest, not the parochial interest of Jacksonville. Obama's plan takes resources from all of us to invest in a few ports. If Jacksonville or Miami or Florida—or even a bunch of oil companies and shipping companieswant to try to enrich themselves by enlarging certain ports, that should be their business, not the president's.

Nevertheless, Obama has been trying to expedite federal permitting and clear away some of the red tape that normally constrains such projects, and he proudly told Jacksonville, "Where I can act on my own, I'm going to act on my own. I won't wait for Congress."

That has an ominous sound. Lawlessness is the fundamental characteristic of tyranny. Without giving a thought to law, the president picks what regulations and laws to enforce and which to expedite or ignore. He has also made it his business to stand in the way of infrastructure investments that would be made by the private sector, such as Trans-Canada's expansion of the Keystone pipeline system. The XL project cleared all reasonable hurdles and now faces more delay.

President Obama is not a tyrant and he doesn't want to be one. But, as in these examples from the politics of energy, impatience and certainty occasionally make him sound like one. He has to wait for Congressall of it, including the Republicans. If he learns that at last, the remaining years of his presidency will be smoother and productive
 

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