Hypocrisy by public officials is especially rank when ordinary Americans will pay for it for years to come. The stench coming now from the congressional Democratic “Blue Dog Coalition” – which bills itself first and foremost as “fiscally conservative” – is particularly offensive. The smell emanates from a Nov. 7 statement by prominent Blue Dog member Jim Cooper, D-TN: “I’m not sure the old rules are relevant anymore. It would be unfair to the new president to put him in a budget straitjacket.” Put otherwise, the Blue Dogs are willing to give President Obama a pass on spending discipline.
The “old rule” to which Cooper refers is the very one the Blue Dogs made the absolute center of their existence during George W. Bush’s presidency. Called “paygo” (short for “pay as you go”), the rule required that any spending increases or tax cuts be offset with spending decreases or tax hikes elsewhere in the federal budget for at least six years. The Blue Dogs used paygo repeatedly to try foiling tax reductions proposed by Bush, or to raise taxes to pay for new spending initiatives.
In short, the Blue Dogs’ entire reason for being was to impose a “budget straitjacket” on the federal government. Now that Obama will be in the White House that central tenet of the Blue Dog faith has been blithely discarded. Apparently the renewed creed will be the familiar Democratic refrain of “spend, spend, spend, and elect, elect, elect.”
Paygo wasn’t perfect. Too often, it was used not to restrain spending, but to hike taxes. And it never took into account the “dynamic” effect of taxes, meaning that tax cuts partly “pay for themselves” by encouraging people to work harder and save more. Paygo was also flawed by the reality that tax hikes typically result in less revenue for the Treasury than projected because they stifle economic growth.
Despite it being too blunt an instrument, at least paygo imposed a semblance of consistent discipline on congressional budgeting. By abandoning it now, the Blue Dogs reveal themselves to be motivated not by discipline, but instead by a desire for partisan advantage. Now that Obama’s initiatives, rather than Bush’s, are at issue, fiscal propriety goes out the window and worse, coming generations will have to pay the price.
