Starving the Beast, Karl Rove Style

Unfortunately, explaining all this doesn’t help. It’s kind of like the old saying, to paraphrase: You can’t get a man to understand something if validating his political prejudices depends on his not understanding it.

Just by way of example, obviously there are a lot of people out there who hate President Obama for reasons that have nothing to do with His Policies™, but that cannot be expressly admitted in public or in polite company. So they have to pretend that it’s really His Policies™ that are the problem, and that it’s not hatred but a strong Disagreement™ with His Policies™.

So The Debt™ becomes an easy target because on the surface it seems easy to understand. The Debt™ was X when Obama took office, The Debt™ is now Y, therefore Obama Increased The Debt™ by Y-X. Simple. That’s all you need to know. (If I had a dime for every time I heard/read a GOP fan say that Y, or Y-X, is “all you need to know,” I would be able to finance Obama’s campaign myself.) It’s much easier to wrap your head around that than it is around things like:

- The laws policies, programs, initiatives, contracts and commitments that come into being during one presidency do not stop costing money when that presidency ends.

- The laws policies, programs, initiatives, contracts and commitments that come into being during one presidency do not stop affecting the national economy when that presidency ends.

- The end of one presidency does not extinguish the nation’s obligation to pay for the laws policies, programs, initiatives, contracts and commitments put into place during that presidency.

- A president cannot unilaterally decide to stop paying for the laws policies, programs, initiatives, contracts and commitments that were put into place during previous administrations.

- The government has to do its job, and pay its bills, no matter who is president.

- When the government goes into debt, it has to service that debt, on top of the normal cost of running the country.

Here’s a good way of explaining it:

I take over a company where my predecessor ordered and had installed $10,000 worth of office furniture, but didn’t pay for it and didn’t put it on the balance sheet for last year. I show up on my first day and find on my desk a bill for $10,000, plus interest. So I write a check and pay that bill. Who “spent” that $10,000, me or my predecessor?

Time goes on and I discover that there are a lot of unpaid bills that my predecessor left me, and took out some loans that weren’t reflected on the balance sheets for those years. So I start paying those bills and servicing those debts, but at the same time I still have to spend money to run the company, pay my employees, replenish supplies, etc. So even though the cost of running the company hasn’t really changed, it looks like I’m spending a lot more because I’ve got all those unpaid bills to pay and all that debt to service. And if my revenues don’t add up to what I’m paying in operating costs + unpaid bills + debt service every month, I have to borrow more.

And all along, my shareholders lionize my predecessor and accuse me of spending too much. Yet I’m actually the one being “fiscally responsible.” Go figure.