In this House, the M.D. doesn’t stand for More Debt

Here we are, two busi­ness days away from the hard ceil­ing on the debt limit, after blow­ing through the acoustic tiles a cou­ple of months ago. And yet, there’s no passed increase in the debt ceil­ing. The House is sup­posed to be vot­ing on their bill as we post this. It’s not clear that the House alone can pass a bill on the debt, let alone the House, Sen­ate, and Pres­i­dent together.

It’s fine to make a state­ment via one’s votes, or to grand­stand in a debate. That’s the polit­i­cal side of gov­ern­ment, and it’s a nec­es­sary part of get­ting peo­ple involved in the dis­cus­sion. But, at the end of the day, government’s first job is to run the coun­try. The debate comes second.

Draw­ing on my House ref­er­ence above, it’s fine to remind an obese per­son who’s hav­ing a heart attack that they really need to diet. But per­haps the car­diopul­monary resus­ci­ta­tion is a lit­tle bit more impor­tant right now.

And so we have the Tea Party in the House, insist­ing that we must cut our calo­ries, and do it now. And they’re wav­ing a con­tract in front of the patient demand­ing he com­mit to a spe­cific calo­rie load for­ever more — before chest com­pres­sions. Talk about the cart before the horse!

Yes, we need fis­cal responsibility.

We need to cut our health care costs down to a level com­men­su­rate with the rest of the indus­tri­al­ized world. Most of the other cuts that have been dis­cussed, while fine addi­tions, are round­ing errors com­pared to health care. Literally.

We also need to return our income taxes to real­is­tic lev­els. Since the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion, income taxes were at about 10% of GDP (plus or minus a per­cent), until George W. Bush dropped it to 7%. Those three per­cent rep­re­sent approx­i­mately half a tril­lion dol­lars a year. And that’s at our cur­rent GDP, which is sig­nif­i­cantly below its 2007 level.

Cut­ting health care costs will be com­pli­cated, but revert­ing the income tax is triv­ially easy. If the debt is truly the most impor­tant issue fac­ing our nation today, as the Tea Party insists, then undo­ing the Bush tax cuts should be their num­ber one pri­or­ity. That it isn’t tells us that the debt is not their high­est priority.

Mean­while, the patient is still in car­diac arrest…

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