SEND IN the technocrats! There has been much disparaging comment among US columnists about European democracies’ inability to cope with tough decisions and their resort to technocratic governments to steer them out of trouble. To which the only reply can be “Physician heal thyself”.
Having bought itself three months’ budget respite by setting up a bipartisan “supercommittee” to work out a deficit reduction package, the deeply polarised, dysfunctional three-headed monster that is US political decisionmaking – House, Senate and presidency – has again demonstrated its unerring capacity for ending in gridlock.
With the national debt at a staggering $15 trillion, had the committee of six fulfilled its mission, the US would face cumulative deficits of $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years, compared with $4.7 trillion without cuts.
But, with the deadline for agreement passed, and no sign of any coming together even remotely on the horizon, the prospect now is for the implementation of the agreed, automatic default position, a binding “sequester”, anathema to all, which was supposed to concentrate minds – $1,200 billion in automatic cuts, to fall equally on defence and non-defence domestic spending, and to kick in in 2013.
Now some Republican Congress members are talking about undoing the sequester, specifically defence cuts, although President Obama promises to veto any Bill wriggling out of automatic cuts, and leaders of both parties remain committed to it. House Speaker John Boehner, who earlier this month said he was “morally bound” to honour it, promised to “forge ahead with the commitments we have made”. A retreat is seen as likely to spook the capital markets and could lead to a downgrade of the countrys credit rating.
Impaled on a hook of their own making, both parties will probably have no alternative but to revisit the entire package on the floor of Congress in the hope of producing the sort of compromise that previously eluded both them and the committee. But with Republican members, handcuffed as they are to their Grover Norquist tax pledge, still insisting on the impossibility of any tax increase (and that includes the impossibility of phasing out any temporary tax reliefs) the prospects are not good. The only small light on the horizon appears to be a grudging willingness to help the president extend a payroll tax break due to lapse in December.
Some might say a government of technocrats is beginning to look more appealing ... .