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THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW - January 19, 2010
Is a U.S. Default Inevitable?
by Pat Buchanan
We were blindsided. We never saw it coming.
So said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein of the financial
crisis of 2008. He likened its probability to four
hurricanes hitting the East Coast in a single season.
Blankfein was reminded by the chairman of the Financial
Crisis Inquiry Committee, Phil Angelides, that hurricanes
are "acts of God." Financial crises are manmade. Yet
Blankfein was backed up by Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, who
said, "Somehow, we just missed... that home prices don't
go up forever."
The Wall Street titans thus conceded they did not foresee
the housing bubble ever bursting and they did not consider
the possibility of a collapse in value of the sub-prime
mortgage securities piled up on their books.
Backing up Blankfein's plea of ignorance and incomprehens-
ion is this: The crisis killed Lehman Brothers and would
have killed every one of them had not the Treasury and
Fed, neither of which saw it coming, either, intervened
with hundreds of billions in bailout cash.
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Yet there were those who warned a housing bubble was being
created like the dot-com bubble; others who predicted the
Empire of Debt was coming down. As, today, there are those
warning that the United States, with consecutive deficits
running 10 percent of gross domestic product, is risking
an eventual default on its national debt.
The warnings come from the Committee on the Fiscal Future
of the United States, chaired by Rudolph Penner, former
head of the Congressional Budget Office, and David Walker,
former head of the Government Accountability Office and
author of "Comeback America: Turning the Country Around
and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility."
With that share of the U.S. national debt held by
individuals, corporations, pension funds and foreign
governments having risen in 2009 from 41 percent to 53
percent of GDP, Penner and Walker believe it imperative
to get the deficit under control. Unfortunately, it is
not possible to see how, politically, this can be done.
Consider. The five largest elements in the budget are
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense and interest
on the debt.
With interest rates near record lows, and certain to rise,
and back-to-back $1.4 trillion deficits, this budget item
has to grow and has to be paid if the U.S. government is
to continue to borrow.
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Second, with seniors on fire against Medicare cuts in
health care reform, it would be fatal for the Obama
Democrats to curtail Social Security or Medicare benefits
any further this year. Next year, they will not only lack
the congressional strength but any desire to do so, after
their anticipated shellacking this fall.
The same holds true for Medicaid. The Party of Government
is not going to cut health benefits for its most loyal
supporters. Indeed, federal costs may rise as state govern-
ments, constitutionally required to balance their budgets,
cut social benefits and beg the feds to pick up the slack.
This leaves defense. But the president is deepening the
U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to 100,000 troops, and
the military needs to replace weaponry and machines
depreciated in a decade of war.
Where, then, are the spending cuts to come from?
Can the administration cut Homeland Security, the FBI or
CIA after the near disaster in Detroit? Will Obama cut
the spending for education he promised to increase? Will
he cut funding for Food Stamps, unemployment insurance
or the Earned Income Tax Credit in a recession? For the
near term, the entitlements are untouchables.
Is this Democratic Congress, which increased the budgets
of all the departments by an average of 10 percent, going
to take a knife to federal agencies or federal salaries,
when federal bureaucrats and beneficiaries of federal
programs are the most reliable voting blocs in their
coalition?
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What about tax hikes?
Obama has promised to let the Bush tax cuts lapse for
those earning $250,000 but has pledged not to raise
taxes on the middle class. Any broad-based tax would
be politically suicidal for him and his increasingly
unpopular party.
But if taxes are off the table, Afghan war costs are
inexorably rising, and cuts in Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid and entitlement programs are politically
impossible, as pressure builds for a second stimulus,
how does one reduce a deficit of $1.4 trillion?
How does one stop the exploding national debt from surging
above 100 percent of GDP?
America is the oldest and greatest constitutional republic,
the model for all the others. But if our elected
politicians are incapable of imposing the sacrifices needed
to pull the nation back from the brink of a devaluation or
default, is democratic capitalism truly, as Francis
Fukuyama told us just two decades ago, the future of
mankind?
What the looming fiscal crisis of this country portends
is nothing less than a test of whether this democratic
republic is sustainable.
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