A few weeks ago, the Center for American Progress (CAP) blogged on the phenomenon of the “deficit peacock.” We all recognize the type: The politician of either party who rails against high fiscal deficits and rising federal debt without having a practical plan to address either. The peacocks like to be thought of as deficit hawks but, when policy push comes to legislative shove, they show their true plumage.
Now CAP, a liberal think-tank closely associated with the Obama administration, was clearly trying to score political points against Republicans. But the post does express an important truth. It’s easy to complain about the deficit without making serious proposals to reduce it. It’s easy to call for smaller government without explain how, precisely, we get one. It’s easy to pick out egregious — if fiscally trivial — examples of pork. But things get hard — really hard — when it comes to the real business of reducing the deficit: cutting expenditures and raising taxes.
A case in point: the Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003. Unlike the Obama administration’s stimulus package, the drug benefit was neither a response to an economic crisis nor limited in duration. Estimated to cost nearly a trillion dollars between 2009 and 2019, the drug benefit contained no serious revenue provisions. And who voted for this bill? Many of the politicians who now posture about deficits. The list of “yea” votes in the Senate makes interesting reading. Texas’s U.S. senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn — both “fiscal conservatives” — supported the drug benefit.
The bottom line is this: The next time you hear a politician, whether a Democrat or a Republican, talk about the need for budgetary responsibility, ask the following two questions:
Does the politician’s record — as opposed to his rhetoric — suggest that he’s actually serious?
Does he have pragmatic proposals — as opposed to platitudes or calls for picayune cuts — about how we are going to close our fiscal gap?
If the answer to either is “no,” you’ve probably sighted a deficit peacock. It won’t take you long to find one. There are lots of them around. And they love to appear on TV.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.