Mar 30, 2011
IBD

Irresponsibility: Democrats in Congress are aping their counterparts in the Wisconsin state Senate on the budget: Rather than cut, they scurry away — which in their case means a government shutdown soon.

And over a lousy $60 billion. Never mind vitally needed reform of the entitlement programs hurtling us toward a fiscal train wreck. Forget repealing ObamaCare spending and reversing the stimulus that doesn’t stimulate, costing in the t-for-trillions. Democrats won’t embrace even the paltry first step back toward fiscal sanity that House Republicans are asking for.

They’d rather shut down the government and cross their fingers that the GOP gets blamed, as during the Clinton presidency.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Democrats may not be leaving town and going into hiding like Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators did in vain a few weeks back. But the tack they’re taking is just as cowardly.

Democrats started Washington’s current budget crisis by keeping their high rate of government spending on cruise control last year in lieu of a budget. House Republicans passed their modest spending cuts weeks ago in mid-February, and Stanford economist John B. Taylor believes the GOP legislation is also a jobs bill.

“The high unemployment we are experiencing now is due to low private investment rather than low government spending,” Taylor said in a recent analysis.

The House Republicans’ spending-cut package could “increase economic growth and employment as the federal government begins to put its fiscal house in order and encourage job-producing private-sector investment,” Taylor concluded.

You heard right: Democrats are blocking — and willing to shut the government down over — a bill likely to generate lots of private-sector jobs at a time when the suffering U.S. economy sorely needs it.

Why? It’s no mystery. Former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean recently spoke of “quietly rooting” for a government shutdown, believing it would be blamed on Republicans. And as Charles Schumer, Senate Democrats’ former fundraising chief, mistakenly said into an open mike on Tuesday, the strategy is to make Republicans look “extreme.”

Schumer’s scheme is for Democrats to appear reasonable, “but the Tea Party is pulling (House Speaker John) Boehner too far over to the right and so far over that there is no more fruitful negotiations.”

Schumer’s narrative calls for making the public believe that “the only way we can avoid a shutdown is for Boehner to come up with a reasonable compromise and not just listen to what the Tea Party wants.”

If Republicans are to succeed in beginning to take the country back on the road toward fiscal soundness, they must be just as crafty as Schumer — consistently adhering to their own talking points, with the advantage that theirs are based on truth.

As a government shutdown looms, they must tell the public again and again that the spendaholic Democrats ardently refuse to make even tiny cuts, our children’s future be damned.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/567594/201103301844/Runaway-Dems.htm

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