Senseless economic cuts

The daughter of friends of Father Orthoduck and his wife has a summer internship at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), which is quite an honor. She returns to college this fall after a summer of experiencing the crazy world of political Washington, DC. AEI is one of the top five think tanks for conservative political thinkers. At their best, they provide some cogent economic and political analysis from a thinking conservative viewpoint. As with any politically affiliated think tank, … but that is not a subject for this posting.

The subject for Father Orthoduck’s posting is an article from their best side called Mindless Cuts Can Have Dangerous Results. There are several quotes from that article that particularly struck Father Orthoduck in light of the current impasse in the budget debate. Here are a few quotes from the article which you should read in its entirety:

Last week, at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s conference, my former colleague (and former Roll Call impresario) Jim Glassman complained that the focus of the conference, just like Congress, was on how to cut the budget and get past the debt ceiling and debt crisis, while ignoring a larger issue–how to grow the economy to create a better life for our children and grandchildren.

He noted that there are many ideas out there to enhance economic growth, shared by both parties or offering opposing views. Those ideas might include (some of them on my list) a better tax code, lower marginal rates, even, a la Tim Pawlenty, slashing taxes by even more mind-boggling amounts; it might mean more spending on infrastructure, science and education.

Please notice that this is one of the increasing conservative voices saying that across the board cuts are not a good thing. Rather, he says that cuts have to be thought through and that, in fact, there may be some areas in which we need to spend more not less! He gives a very cogent example of what across the board cutting could mean for us.

This vacuum emerged again last week when House Republicans jammed through, on a partisan vote, an appropriations bill that slashed funding for food safety and barred the Food and Drug Administration from implementing the major food safety law enacted in the 111th Congress.

I wrote about this set of issues earlier this year, when the House plan to cut discretionary spending in the continuing resolution included an effective 22 percent cut for the remainder of the fiscal year for the meat-inspection service of the Department of Agriculture and an equivalent cut for food inspection from the FDA, along with a deep cut in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As I pointed out, using data from Scott Lilly, former staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, the cuts in meat inspection would mean serious furloughs among meat inspectors and their support staff, who account for more than 90 percent of the agency budget.

That in turn could be extrapolated to mean about a million pounds of tainted meat and poultry being put on the shelves in supermarkets and butcher shops and on the menu in restaurants.

Given the statistics we have on the number of foodborne illnesses that hit Americans each year–48 million–that result in 128,000 hospitalized and 3,000 killed, those cuts would surely mean more hospitalizations and more deaths.

Needless to say, the savings received by cutting the FDA are penny wise and pound foolish. For, the increased spending on health related costs would damage the economy more severely than even maintaining the current rate of funding at the FDA. Finally, he says from a conservative viewpoint what various moderates and liberals have been saying for months.

These kinds of cuts are seriously stupid and counterproductive, but the “debate” on the House floor brushed any concerns aside with the mantra of cutting deficits and the argument that our food supply is safe because the private sector wants it to be safe. …

Whether it is offshore drilling, building construction, airline travel or sausage production, stuff happens and corners are cut to reduce costs or make bigger profits. Independent inspections are mandatory. Regulators can be captured by interests, as happened for decades at the Interior Department when it comes to oil drilling, or can be slothful or inefficient. But they are necessary for both public safety and public confidence.

There are places to cut budgets, and there is a necessary role for Congress in overseeing regulators and inspectors, making sure they operate in a lean, mean and effective fashion.

But mindless cuts that are utterly penny-wise and pound-foolish, like these, show how distorted our deliberative process has become. In the headlong rush to provide a better fiscal future for our children, we should not be providing a less safe present for all of us.

For those of you who are in the cut everything camp, Father Orthoduck would suggest reading this article. For those of you in either the taxes must be cut no matter what camp, or in the everything except the military and defense must be cut camp, you need to seriously read this article and reconsider. What we need is a rationalized budget in which our spending priorities are carefully ranked, and the money necessary to fund those priorities is brought in, yes by taxes. As the article points out, starving the government in a way that sets us up for epidemics of tainted food or interstate roads that decay into collapse is utter foolishness. And, Father Orthoduck thinks that you will find that more and more serious writers from conservative, moderate, and liberal camps are beginning to say very similar things on this subject.