Republican strategists have a problem. The scale of what President Barack Obama proposes to do to the American economy is so enormous, so far-reaching and so potentially disastrous that the opposition party is having a hard time describing it.
“How do you translate the numbers into something that people can grasp to represent the broader problem?” a Republican pollster asked in a recent conversation. John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders would love to hear an answer, but the pollster didn’t have one.
GOP message mavens are struggling with something that academics call “insensitivity to scope.” It affects us all; we can understand something on a small scale but have a difficult time comprehending the same thing on a massive scale.
Insensitivity to scope is a major obstacle to understanding the Obama administration’s $3.6 trillion 2010 budget. People simply have trouble understanding a number so big. A recent poll asked Americans how many million are in a trillion. Twenty-one percent of respondents got the answer right — it’s a million million. Most people thought it was a lot less.
Republicans are facing that obstacle as they try to explain the dimensions of Obama’s spending plan. The GOP pollster told me he tries to explain it by asking people to think of a dollar as a second — one dollar, one brief tick of your watch. A million seconds, the pollster explained, equals eleven days. A billion seconds equals 31 years. And a trillion seconds equals 310 centuries.
The task of educating voters got a little more urgent Monday, when the government announced the not-terribly-surprising news that federal tax revenues will be smaller this year than previously thought. After a review of the Obama budget’s numbers before formal submission to Congress, Budget Director Peter Orszag said this year’s deficit will be $1.841 trillion — $89 billion more than previously estimated. If you’re listening to the ticks of your watch, that’s about 570 centuries.
You may remember last week that Obama proposed, with much fanfare, $17 billion in budget cuts. Now, his budget director announces that the deficit will go up by $89 billion. “A paperwork change increased the size of the deficit more than five times greater than the savings they proposed last week,” one key Republican Senate aide told me. The deficit will likely grow again in a few months when the budget office does a routine midyear review.
And it will grow bigger still if Obama’s remarkably optimistic predictions for the economy don’t pan out. On Monday the White House forecast that the economy will be growing at a 3.5 percent annual rate by the end of this year. That’s a nice growth rate in a non-recession year. But now? After the economy shrank at an annual rate of 6.1 percent in the first quarter? “They say we’re going to have almost a 10-point swing in the span of six months,” the GOP aide told me. “That’s a really rosy scenario.”
Meanwhile, the president is taking every opportunity to argue that real recovery won’t be possible unless we spend hundreds of billions of dollars to enact his so-far-unspecified health care reform plan. “I’ve said repeatedly that getting health care costs under control is essential to reducing budget deficits, restoring fiscal discipline, and putting our economy on a path towards sustainable growth and shared prosperity,” Obama said at the White House on Monday.
In the Obama scenario, health care reform equals recovery, an argument that leaves some Republican critics shaking their heads. Think back to last fall and the economic crash. There was a lot of talk about an overleveraged society, about Fannie Mae, about credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. Amid the emergency, was anyone saying, “We will never recover from this downturn unless we enact universal health care”? Obama is pulling off the world’s biggest change-of-subject.
In the end, it is becoming clearer and clearer that, as the deficit projections rise, the president is betting the fiscal health of the nation on his ability to enact universal, or near-universal, health care and, in the process of extending expensive health coverage to millions of currently uninsured Americans, actually save money for the taxpayers. It’s the biggest bet in generations, and its outcome will determine not only the fate of Obama’s presidency, but the nation’s fiscal future as well.
Byron York is The Examiner’s chief political correspondent. His columns appear Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts can be read daily at ExaminerPolitics.com.
