Democrats: Party of the Walking Brain Dead.

Democrats just don't get it. They have been facing their Goldwater moment for the past 25 years and have consistently refused to reinvent themselves. The advance of the radical Right has less to do with any compelling message on their part but more to do with the intellectual bankruptcy and lack of strategic vision on the part of Democrats. Going into the 2006 mid-term election it seems their best hope is not to win on ideas but to hope the GOP self-destructs.

There are undoubtedly some very intelligent and perceptive people in the Democratic Party. Yet that talent never seems to rub off on the entire Party. How the Democrats deal with budget numbers... an issue that could work in their favor, provides a perfect example.

For the past 25 years the most radical elements of the Right have had a clear strategy to sabotage the finances of the federal government. They call it “starving the beast”. Rather than debate social safety net programs on their merit, they have preferred to push through irresponsible tax cuts to create massive deficits. Such policies serve a political purpose: they bring home the bacon to their wealthy and business constituents while depriving the Dems of ways to serve their own constituencies. The radical Right has never cared if We The People piss away trillions on interest... some $352 BILLION in FY05 alone... as long as that money was not available to do some good for the American People. To get a sense of immense scale of waste here... taxpayer money spent on interest in FY05 is about 20X the entire NASA budget of about $17 billion. The utter contempt the radical Right has for the average citizen is beyond measure. But you'll never hear Democrats making this argument nor will you hear them educate the public that interest is the biggest waste of taxpayer money in the budget.

While Clinton understood the fiscal trap the Right had set, he never went out of his way to educate the public about what the Right was up to. Clinton just made it a top priority to get to a budget surplus and in doing so intended to protect the future viability of the Democratic Party. Sadly Clinton never sufficiently inoculated the Public against the Right's Big Lies. He failed to build up a large constituency dedicated to preserving that surplus and to paying down the national debt. It was a strategic blunder that may have backfired in the 2000 election. In 2000 Bush was obviously determined to follow in Reagan’s path to again sabotage revenues before any debt was actually paid down. Did the Democrats try to expose the Right's ploy? Hardly. They just proposed their own irresponsible tax cuts! As George Lakoff might say... this proposal just reinforced the Right's conceptual frame that the pubic needed "tax relief". The Democrats never put forth a competing conceptual frame that it was in the national interest to pay down the debt, nor that it was criminally irresponsible for the Right to bribe voters today with money stolen from future taxpayers. How can Democrats EVER expect to expose the Right's Big Lie that tax cuts are a free lunch if they refuse to expose the true extent of the damage created by the Right's scorched earth fiscal policies?

By 2000 nearly 2 decades had gone by where Democrats COULD have been educating the public about the Right’s plans to sabotage government... and refused. This failure is reminiscent of the Democrats ineptitude in devising an effective strategy to protect the federal judiciary against radical Right-wing justices. More on that here: here.

Sadly, the federal budget is like a shell game. On the on-budget side of the ledger we have most of what we consider as government functions... the military, NIH, FBI, NASA etc. Trust funds like Social Security are considered off-budget. But if there is a surplus in these off-budget trust funds as there is today... about $180 billion for FY06, by law this surplus is loaned to the government. If there's an on-budget surplus... a very rare event, the money is used to pay down the overall public debt even as it's adding to the intragovernmental debt.

This point bears repeating: only a true ON-budget surplus can be used to lower overall debt. If there's an on-budget deficit... as is usually the case, the trust fund money is borrowed, then spent. To date according to Bureau of Public Debt the intragovernmental debt is over $3.7 TRILLION.

So why do both parties use the unified budget numbers? The answer is simple: these numbers offer BOTH parties political cover since they make deficits look smaller by concealing hundreds of billions in borrowing from the trust funds and also can make any surplus look larger. Using unified budget numbers Clinton could claim a surplus in FY98 even as money was still being borrowed from the trust funds adding to the intragovernmental debt while being used to pay down the public debt. The unified budget surplus for FY98-00 was $431 Billion yet in reality the true Clinton on-budget surplus totaled only a paltry $90 billion in FY99 and FY00. When compared to the national debt then at 5.8 Trillion, it was a drop in the bucket… and by FY01 the on-budget surplus was gone.

What the Democrats never seem to understand is they can't claim to be the TRUE party of fiscal responsibility if they play such games with the budget numbers. Even when the numbers work in their favor they refuse to tell the American People just how fiscally irresponsible Bush has been. The Democrats can't educate the public about the budget if they continue to propose sugar-coated deficit reduction plans of their own that conceal hundreds of billions in trust fund borrowing. Yet this is exactly what Kerry did in 2004. By using the unified budget figures in his 2004 deficit reduction plan, Kerry concealed about a trillion in borrowing over 5 years. Not only was it a strategic blunder not to expose the Right's game plan... it was a scandalous display of how the Democrats also have contempt for the public.

So here comes election 2006. Again the deficit numbers are outrageous... hitting record highs. These numbers again work to the benefit of the Democrats. But have the Democrats changed their ways? Hardy. They again refuse to even use the true Bush deficit numbers. Here's an example.

From http://www.democrats.org

2001: Bush Deliberately Underestimated Future Deficits. In 2001, Bush predicted massive budget surpluses over the following four years, in order to make the case that we could afford his tax cut plan. Instead, each of those years will suffer an actual or likely deficit. In 2001, Bush predicted a $231 billion surplus in 2002 (reality: $158 billion deficit), $246 billion surplus in 2003 (reality: $375 billion deficit), $268 billion surplus in 2004 (reality: $422 billion projected deficit), and $273 billion surplus in 2005 (reality: $348 billion projected deficit.

Who's underestimating deficits?

The TRUE Bush deficit is the ON BUDGET deficit. Here are those numbers from page 22 of this OMB report.

1999: +1.920 BILLION
2000: +86.422 BILLION
2001: -32.445 BILLION
2002: -317.417 BILLION not 158 billion
2003: -538.418 BILLION not 375 billion
2004: -567.961 BILLION not 422 billion
2005: -493.611 BILLION not 348 billion
2006: -602.141 BILLION estimated

It's just another in a long series of strategic failures on the part of the Democrats to blunt the Right's offensive. Since they don't seem to have the sense to go head to head and expose the Right's lies... their best hope of winning elections is for the Right to implode. If the Democrats win in this manner... that Goldwater moment to reinvent themselves will surely be put off again.

(Originally published in April 06 and updated 10-19-06)

ulTRAX