Congress' $50 billion sham

The $50 billion GOP deficit reduction plan narrowly passed by the U.S. House of Representatives recently is a sham. It does not reduce spending at all; it simply reduces spending's rate of growth.

Talk about your fuzzy math. Washington is still a place that operates on the strange principle that if you spent $1 million last year and want to spend $2 million next year, but decide to spend only $1.5 million instead, it's defined not as a half-million-dollar spending increase, but as a half-million dollar-spending cut.

In reality, the House's so-called budget-cutting plan actually increases the size of government. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, the rate of growth reductions still allows spending to grow at twice the rate of inflation. What kind of savings is that?

The original version of the House's Deficit Reduction Act would have saved nearly $54 billion over five years and opened up a tiny section of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration that could have brought down gas prices. House Democrats unanimously opposed any kind of budget reconciliation bill with the GOP majority, so the way was open for Republican moderates to be the balance of power. To win their votes, the leadership had to restore about $4 billion in spending and drop the ANWR provision.

Tom Schatz of the non-partisan Council for Citizens Against Government Waste puts the so-called savings in perspective. In the original bill, before the GOP moderates restored $4 billion in special-interest social spending, the savings restrained growth in mandatory entitlement spending by one-tenth of 1 percent.

The federal budget comes to nearly $2 trillion a year, and Congress can't slow spending growth by less that a penny on the dollar over a five-year period? That is ludicrous. Yet because it touches on entitlement programs, Democrats and some of GOP moderates make it sound like the cutbacks in spending growth would starve widows and children, and let the sick and elderly die in the streets.

This goes beyond demagoguery; it's insanity. There's nothing compassionate in allowing wasteful entitlement spending to continue growing at unsustainable rates.

Consider that during a decade of GOP congressional leadership the "party of smaller, smarter government" has sent federal spending through the roof. In the past four years alone, it's up by 33 percent to nearly $22,000 per household. Non-military and non-homeland security spending is up $303 billion. The deficit stands at $317 billion and the federal debt has passed $8 trillion. And mandatory spending now constitutes 54 percent of the federal budget.

Both political parties should be ashamed. The House's $50 billion spending cutback, which may be even too much for the Senate, isn't even a drop in the bucket. If our national leaders can't curb entitlement and domestic spending any more than this, then the nation is headed for an economic armageddon.