Let's fix what ails us: A deficit of common sense

The words of Sen. Max Baucus in the Congressional Record are admirable: “Giant deficits are killing us. ... Clearly we cannot keep borrowing this way. We must act.”

Considering that Sen. Baucus, D-Mont., is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance and a member of the so-called “Super Committee” which has been tasked with finding a solution to the $1.3 trillion annual deficit, those are heartening words.

But don’t be fooled.

The senator’s gallant words were not some battle cry to inspire his “Super” colleagues to join together and find common ground in 2011, but rather a ghostly echo from 1984, when he was a relatively junior member of the Senate Budget Committee approaching the end of his first term and worried that “huge and persistent deficits” would “mortgage our children’s future by forcing them to pay for our mistakes.”

Alas, 27 years later, the children are here — all grown up — and they are being made to pay dearly for the inaction of their elders — the well-intentioned Sen. Baucus included.

Indeed, as we approach the Nov. 23 deadline for the “Super Committee” to present a solution to our national crisis, the concerns of Baucus 27 years ago seem almost quaint.

“When the Federal Government closed its books for 1984, it was overdrawn, by about $200 billion,” Baucus lamented on the floor of the Senate. “And the debt keeps piling up, at the rate of about $22 million an hour.”

Well, Lordy me! Imagine what the Sen. Baucus of 1984 would have made of the deficit of 2011. We are going to be overdrawn by $1.3 trillion this year, adding to an already existing $15 trillion national debt. And the debt is increasing today by as much as $180 million an hour!

Talk about extravagant spending. As the sagacious senator from Montana intoned in 1984: “Clearly, we cannot keep borrowing this way. We must act.”

But does anyone really think the Senate WILL act? Does anyone really think Congress WILL act? Does anyone think either political party WILL act?

We are in exactly the same situation we were in back in 1984 except worse. Listen to the words of Sen. Baucus and three other senators (including then Sen. Joe Biden) in an op-ed from the Washington Post:

“The Senate Budget Committee’s contentious debate ... over the budget reconciliation bill was disturbing evidence that we have not achieved a thoughtful, bipartisan consensus about how to reduce the deficit... Unfortunately, the major proposals... are more political than substantive. Although they are supposed to reduce the deficit significantly, most of the supposed reductions come not in 1985 but instead in the elusive ‘out years.’

“This kind of deferred solution won’t convince the American people that Congress is serious about reducing the deficit. It won’t convince the managers of our financial markets that Congress is serious about reducing the deficit. And it doesn’t convince us, either.”

Thank you for the clarity, Sen. Baucus and Sens. Biden, Kassebaum and Grassley. No one could have said it better. “More political than substantive.” Indeed.

And once again, in the competing proposals being studied by the Super Committee, most of the “supposed” reductions come not in the current year, but in the “out years” — in other words in the following nine years in the future where the current Congress doesn’t actually have any control over spending! Most outrageous of all of these “supposed” reductions is the $700 billion in “savings” that Democrats on the Super Committee wanted to count from the fact that the nation doesn’t plan to be involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the entire 10-year period under consideration. Can we all say in unison, “more political than substantive”?

Back in 1984, the rookie senator from Montana seem to grasp all this pretty clearly. He sent a copy of his Washington Post op-ed and his comments from the Congressional Record to a Kalispell constituent, with a note that read, “Thank you for contacting me to express your concern about the federal budget deficit... I assure you that I share your concern.”

Well, it’s 27 years later and the man from Kalispell, a reader of this column, is still waiting for Sen. Baucus to live up to his own words. Most frustrating perhaps was the senator’s disavowal of the need for a Balanced Budget Amendment back in 1984.

“The Constitution was not designed to include specific rules to respond to short-term problems,” Baucus wrote. “Also, the ratification process can take up to seven years. Americans can’t wait that long!”

How do you spell I-R-O-N-Y?

“Can’t wait THAT long?” If the Congress had passed a Balanced Budget Amendment back in 1984 and it had taken seven more years to ratify it by 1991, then we would now be in our second full decade of sane spending. But now we are still waiting 27 years later!

No doubt the senator was entirely sincere when he said, “Americans can’t wait that long,” back in 1984. But the “short-term problem” he thought would be easy to fix has just gotten worse and worse.

To his credit, Sen. Baucus actually did learned from his mistake. He has been a long-time supporter of a Balanced Budget Amendment, and voted for one in 1997 (again, along with now Vice President Joe Biden).

Unfortunately, just this last week, even the Republican House of Representatives was unable to pass the Balanced Budget Amendment by the necessary two-thirds margin. It got 261 votes in favor, and 165 votes against. Most of Sen. Baucus’s fellow Democrats voted against the measure, of course. Not sure whether Vice President Biden forgot to twist arms, or was just busy recommending more trillion-dollar bailouts to the president, but in either case, there is no indication that the administration lifted a finger to pass this common-sense solution.

It would seem clear that to some extent the reason why there has been no real progress on cutting spending or bringing about budget sanity is because of institutional resistance in Congress to telling the unpleasant truth to voters. It would also seem likely that the public knows exactly what is going on, which is why congressional approval ratings have been hovering in the low teens.

Maybe Sen. Baucus and his colleagues need to step back from the perch of their seniority and their entrenched political careers, and remember what it was like to be a young idealistic candidate who wanted to make the world a better place.

Baucus certainly started out in the right place. Back in 1975, when he was a freshman congressman just eight months into his first term in the U.S. House, Baucus told a small crowd in Kalispell about his own frustrations with Washington, D.C., politics:

“The biggest problem that we face, pure and simple, is the problem if what I call ‘bigness.’ One of the basic controls in government is through the budget process. But the problem is that the budgets are so mammoth that it’s virtually impossible to get a handle on it.”

Right again, Max.

Indeed, those gargantuan budget bills are so big that no one really knows what they even contain — certainly not the senators who vote on them. And maybe that’s a place to start if we want to cut spending. Maybe senators and congressmen need to take responsibility to know what they are voting for.

But it’s a long way from that freshman congressman in 1975 to the six-term senator in 2011. It’s hard to know whether Rep. Baucus would even recognize Sen. Baucus, or whether he would characterize his older self the way he did some of his colleagues in 1975: “Too many congressmen are soft and unresponsive.”

In 2010, Sen. Baucus told a questioner in Libby, Montana, that it would be unreasonable to expect him to read the entire Obama health-care bill that he was sponsoring.

“I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health-care bill,” he told the questioner. “You know why? It’s statutory language. We hire experts.”

Rep. Baucus would have had an answer to that back in 1975. He told the Daily Inter Lake and 160 citizens at a town hall meeting that he favored legislation limiting the number of consecutive terms a legislator may serve.

The reason? “To weed out complacency.”

Yep, there was something special about that young congressman. I’d vote for him again tomorrow. I’m not so sure about the old senator. He’s a nice enough guy, but maybe we could do better if we just hired a couple of experts.