Budget showdown: Which side will blink?

No more negotiating, said The New York Times in an editorial. Last week, after “letting a highly destructive budget fight fester far too long,” the White House made what should be its final offer—an additional $6.5 billion in cuts from President Obama’s 2011 budget. That should satisfy House Republicans, but they continue to insist on a total of $61 billion in cuts. The new GOP House caucus, with its wild-eyed influx of Tea Party–backed freshmen, is in no mood to compromise, and is threatening to shut down the government unless brutal cuts are enacted. But Obama must hold firm. The investment-rating firm Moody’s has estimated that the draconian, ideology-driven Republican cuts could lead to the loss of 700,000 jobs, slowing down the economic recovery at the worst possible time. And they’d reduce or eliminate funding for a host of invaluable programs, including Head Start, Planned Parenthood, poison control, Pell Grants for college, mine-safety inspections, and regulation of polluting industries by the Environmental Protection Agency. The White House should call the Republicans’ bluff and block this reckless spending plan. “As bad as a shutdown would be,” the GOP’s proposed cuts would be far worse.

Republicans must reject last week’s paltry offer from the president, said Kevin Williamson in National Review Online. The $6.5 billion in cuts he proposed amounts to a vanishingly small 0.001 percent of $6.5 trillion he wants to spend in 2011 and 2012. Despite the nation’s spiraling fiscal crisis, in other words, Obama and the Democrats propose doing nothing about their out-of-control government spending. Yes, there are obvious political risks for Republicans in a 1995-style government shutdown, “but if you’re going to have a fight, this is the fight to have.”

House Speaker John Boehner is in a tight spot, though, said John Harwood in NYTimes.com. He’s trying to “dance, at once, with the independent voters who gave Republicans the House and the conservatives who gave him the speaker’s gavel.” If the GOP comes off as heartless and partisan in its budget slashing, the party could face an electoral backlash in 2012. But if Boehner’s own party perceives him as too willing to cut deals with the White House, he’ll face the fury of the Tea Party, which last week threatened him with a primary. At the moment though, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post, Boehner is cleverly using that predicament to his advantage, persuading Democrats that they must keep giving ground “just to keep the bomb-throwers at bay.”

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Neither side is yet dealing with the real issue, though, said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. The discretionary spending programs being dickered over currently in Washington account for only 12 percent of the federal budget, “and that’s not where the problem is.” The grave and gathering threat to our fiscal future comes from the so-called “entitlement programs” of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which now consume 47 percent of the budget and will, if unchanged, consume an astonishing 64 percent in 2020. Both parties have historically shied away from tackling entitlement reform, for fear of political blowback, but trying to wipe out the deficit or shrink the national debt by cutting the discretionary budget is a bit “like trying to clean your house by doing more and more to organize the hallway closet.” The closet might get a bit neater, but the real mess still awaits you. Sooner or later, both Republicans and Democrats will have to stop procrastinating, roll up their sleeves, and get to work.