Budget deal surprisingly good

The budget compromise adopted Wednesday by the U.S. Senate created quite a ruckus among conservatives, but all things considered it truly wasn’t as bad a deal as some spending hawks have made it out to be.

And for people who have longed for some, or any, form of compromise from a Congress that has long been in gridlock, it’s about as good a deal as can be expected.

The compromise brokered by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., exactly splits the difference between the  budgets each of them proposed.

True, it involves spending increases that exceed the sequester spending cap by $45 billion for the 2014 fiscal year, or about 1.2 percent more than current spending, and it draws additional revenue from an increase in an airline ticket tax. But it also maintains 70 percent of the sequester cuts for 2014 and 2015 and it extends sequester spending caps to the year 2023.

One of the main criticisms of the deal is that future spending cuts just won’t happen. But Americans for Tax Reform — hardly a big spending advocacy group — doesn’t see it that way.

The organization states that “the spending cuts included in the plan are permanent and mandatory .... (the budget deal) is a short-term discretionary spending increase dwarfed in size by a long-run mandatory spending cut.”

In other words, the deal hardly amounts to a Republican capitulation.

With all that said, however, it is very easy to understand where conservative critics are coming from. There is a fierce frustration about the relentless, ratchet-like growth in government and federal spending. “Compromise” never seems to involve an actual reduction in the scope of government through something like the elimination of a redundant or arguably useless bureaucracy. Conservatives critics desperately want government and the national debt to be brought under control, and they want the Republican opposition to be more effective toward those ends. Instead, they get Speaker of the House John Boehner railing at them for complaining.

Well, there is a reason why they are complaining. Frustrated Americans have gotten a steady diet of stories about government waste and malfeasance, and yet nothing seems to change about the way D.C. does business. Just think of Solyndra, the green company that was subsidized to the tune of $535 million before it went bankrupt. There is a laundry list of similar tales of waste, and they never seem to stop.

That is why the sequester cuts are palatable to many of us, despite being ham-handed and untargeted. They actually compelled spending reductions when Congress could not come to agreement on where cuts should be made.

It would be preferable, of course, to have laser-like eradication of wasteful spending rather than cuts that are harmful to places like Glacier National Park. But things have to start somewhere in shifting the rising tide of government, and the Ryan-Murray compromise is one of those things that is a step forward, small as it may well be.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.