Cooler heads oppose a shutdown
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virgina speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington on Monday as Congress resumed work on a spending plan to avoid a government shutdown. Credit: AP
Hard as it is to live with government sometimes, living without it is even worse. So it's a relief to hear that Democrats and Republicans seem to be moving toward an agreement to keep the United States government open for business past Friday, when it would officially run out of money and shut down absent congressional action.
The two sides are working on a two-week stopgap resolution that would prevent an interruption in federal government services. The measure would contain spending cuts that the Democrats find palatable, probably including some that President Barack Obama himself has proposed for the next fiscal year, while dropping - for now at least - the most ideologically driven cuts that Republicans have been advocating.
Unfortunately, the stopgap measure under discussion won't make the longer-term issues go away. Republicans in the House of Representatives, who surely must have known their actions would be rejected by the Democratic Senate majority, recently approved eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Planned Parenthood and health-care reform while cutting spending for medical research and the Environmental Protection Agency.
With the nation still reeling from the aftereffects of the financial crisis, House Republicans also wanted to cut the budgets of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. These are crucial financial watchdogs that, if anything, need more money to uphold expanded responsibilities under the Dodd-Frank financial reforms - which were enacted in 2010 to try and prevent another financial crisis like the one we just had.
These proposed cuts are not so much about saving money as they are about trying to keep the government from doing useful things of which Republicans disapprove. But you can't balance the federal budget by cutting important programs that contribute only infinitesimally to the deficit. Such nonsecurity discretionary items account for a mere 12 percent of what Washington spends. Most of the budget is eaten up by defense, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security - and any meaningful cuts will have to come in those areas.
A two-week respite from the specter of a shutdown - with the clock ticking the whole time - may not be the ideal environment in which to work out a compromise that protects worthwhile programs while achieving spending reductions.
But the alternative - a federal shutdown that could suspend new Social Security applications and hold up some veterans' benefit checks - would harm too many people and potentially undermine the nation's nascent economic recovery.
Some tea party groups have called for a shutdown if necessary to force congressional action on shrinking the federal budget, but such talk is reckless. Democrats, who understand there will have to be cuts, and Republicans, who insist on them, will just have to keep talking. Meanwhile, let's keep the government open, warts and all.
