While the Economy Burns, Washington Fiddles

By JIM MCTAGUE (Barron’s):

America, get shovel-ready: There’s an onslaught of words heading your way from both Congress and the White House about the best way to repair our tottering fiscal edifice. President Obama is skipping about the country talking up his $447 billion jobs plan. Congressional Republicans have responded with high-sounding talk about “Liberating America’s Economy.”

The verbiage is intended to obscure the fact that hardly anyone here in the nation’s capital is actually rolling up his sleeves and tackling the underlying problem.

Politicians of all stripes are shirking responsibility—because to do otherwise might irritate one or another interest group; and the politicians are so unpopular already that they are loath to step on any toes, even if in the interest of doing the right thing. Collectively, the politicians are kicking their work loads down the proverbial road, well past the next election, in a craven strategy for political survival.

EVIDENCE OF THE DUCK-AND-COVER policy is everywhere. Rather than continuing the good fight last week against pork-barrel projects in both the highway bill and the Federal Aviation Administration appropriations bill, House Republicans folded under a hail of negative headlines and agreed to extend existing funding levels for a number of months. No doubt they will extend the funding several more times. They see no advantage in fireworks now that the election season has commenced.

The GOP partially shut down the FAA for two weeks this summer, in a fruitless attempt to get a leaner appropriations package passed. Paychecks failed to go out to some 75,000 workers and contractors. Senate Democrats opposed the FAA-reform measures because the GOP-led House had added antiunion language to the bill. Democrats also objected to a GOP call for the end of shockingly high subsidies to some rural airports. The poster child for the “Essential Air Service” subsidy: an airport in Ely, Nev., which receives $3,700-per-passenger annually from the federal government. The FAA bill has been extended 22 times since its authorization expired in 2007.

Meanwhile, neither party wants to trip up the highway bill, even though the highway-transportation trust fund is taking in less revenue from taxes than it is paying for road work. Balancing that budget would have caused the immediate loss of some 4,000 highway construction jobs. Few politicians want to cut jobs, even if it makes fiscal sense.

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