A longer view, please

“Traditionally, the Chinese think in terms of millennia,” Richard Nixon wrote in his 1980 best-seller, The Real War, “the Russians in terms of centuries, the Europeans in terms of generations, and we Americans in terms of decades.”

Impatience was strategic deficiency in the mind of the former president.

 “We must learn to take a longer view,” Nixon concluded.

In the nearly three decades since Nixon urged national patience as a virtue, our haste to get things done has grown more, not less, frenzied.  Political impatience has reached its highest level yet in the new presidency of Barack Obama.

In his Saturday radio address, the president again demanded that Congress push through his budget with its gargantuan budget deficits.  Fresh figures from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show a $1.85 trillion deficit for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, which is $100 billion more than the administration’s estimate. The CBO says next year’s deficit will reach $1.38 trillion, about $200 billion more than Obama’s forecast.

To give some sense of comparison, look back just to the deficits of FY 2006 and FY 2007.  The deficit for the former was $248 billion; for the latter $163 billion.  The combined deficits of this year and next year –more than $3.2 trillion!-- will be eight times the amount of the total deficit for the years 2006 and 2007.

These extraordinary spending plans are only partly the result of the economic emergency. The Toxic Asset Recovery Program (TARP) and the economic stimulus package account for about half of the giant well of red ink.

The rest of the enormous fiscal sink hole is because President Obama wants to do everything he wants to do right now, including a health care overhaul and a cap-and-trade system of carbon reduction.

Both are enormously expensive endeavors.  Neither should be attempted against the backdrop of a fragile economy.  Each requires massive new tax burdens on critical parts of the economy.  Together they add up to a giant wrecking ball.

The first-100-days nonsense seems to have seized the president’s imagination as much as the increasingly risible Lincoln parallelism.  Members of his own party in the Senate, led by Evan Bayh (not surprisingly a former governor who knows budgets) have begun to balk publicly.

The western Democrats like Baucus of Montana and Dorgan and Conrad of North Dakota know that this sort of spending is utterly ruinous to an economy and a currency.  Some senators like Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, up for re-election in 2010, know that the voters are recoiling from this orgy of spending already, and absent dramatic evidences of a return to growth will judge the entire enterprise a failure.

These and other Democratic senators, working alongside the 41 Republicans, have to put the brakes on the Obama agenda and quickly.  The effort to staple cap-and-trade and health care to the budget reconciliation is the first place where prudence and patience must triumph over Obama’s need for speed.

If the end-run on the ordinary procedures of the Senate succeeds, only 50 votes would be necessary to pass the enormously complicated cap-and-trade law, and already 33 senators –including eight Democrats—have written Senate Budget Committee chairman Conrad to urge that this gimmick be rejected.

The president and his team are taking a “deficits-be-damned” approach to their agenda, assuming that the tax hikes or inflation that will follow can be the inevitable remedies down the road.

The destructive impacts of this approach will not be postponed, however, as markets react immediately to the prospect of incredibly reckless legislation passed by incredibly indifferent ideologues.

The experienced hands around the president and especially on the Hill have to communicate to him now that there are reasons why no government in American history not in an all-out shooting war has ever pursued such a tax-and-spend frenzy.

The president’s budget isn’t remotely responsible; his grandiose plans for remaking the American economy wasn’t a feature of his campaign with its repeated promises of responsible budgeting, and it frightens the public, as it should.

The senior members of both parties need to demand some steadying calm from the new administration, while adopting a longer view themselves.  It isn’t about Obama’s first 100 days.  It is about America’s next 100 years.

Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.