By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Question: If the federal government were to reach the point where it couldn’t pay all its bills, who should be paid first?

A. Soldiers
B. Veterans
C. Investors, domestic and foreign, to whom the U.S. government owes money.

If you answered “C,” then you would agree with 24 Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. They voted last week to advance legislation that would allow the government to keep borrowing money to pay U.S. Treasury bond investors, even if the government reached its supposed debt limit. Payments to Social Security’s trust funds also would continue.

Unfortunately, all 25 of you would be right. The 15 Democrats who make up a minority of the committee voted no, but that’s politics. If the majority and minority roles were reversed, then the Democrats likely would have done what is necessary to keep the U.S. from defaulting on its obligations for the first time ever.

The topic has come up because Congress once again is approaching one of those entirely foreseeable and often manufactured financial crises that threaten the economy and cause the world to question if the United States still knows what it’s doing.

This time, the federal government will exhaust its ability to borrow money in late October, which means it would reach its debt limit in the weeks that follow. Supposedly, that would mean the government couldn’t create more debt. In reality, it just would mean the government temporarily would stop paying its bills – which, of course, would have to be paid later.

That probably won’t happen. What will probably happen is what almost always happens: In Washington, they’ll posture and threaten and argue right up until the last minute, each side accusing the other of “kicking the can down the road,” the most overused cliche in politics these days. And then they’ll pass some measure that keeps the government running for a while – probably until after the November 2016 elections. And then we’ll be stuck wherever that can stopped rolling.

So why even consider that bill approved by the 24 Ways and Means Republicans? The United States government is considered a very safe investment, which is why taxpayers are paying very low interest rates on the $18.2 trillion national debt. Investors – everyone from middle class Americans to the Chinese government – reason that if anyone will pay their money back plus a little interest, it’s Uncle Sam.

What would happen if investors started to doubt that? A U.S. government default would rattle world markets. Meanwhile, interest rates on the debt would rise because investors would see Uncle Sam as more of a risk and would demand a higher return. More of your tax dollars would go into the pockets of investors, domestic and foreign, to pay for the debt the government has already incurred. Less would be available for soldiers and veterans.

Bad things happen when you don’t pay your bills.

At some point, this nonsense must stop. It’s time for the country to stop tiptoeing up to these fiscal cliffs like a teenager trying to scare his girlfriend, One of these days the rocks will be less steady than they seem, and then … well, let’s not be too dramatic. Let’s just say the kid slips several feet down the slope, sprains his ankle, and barely makes it back up the ledge where his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend is waiting.

There’s a simple reason why this keeps happening: Because the voters tolerate it. In fact, they reward it. Members of Congress know that playing these games probably won’t cost them an election. They can always blame the other party and say they did their best as part of a dysfunctional institution. Voters don’t really expect them to do differently. Meanwhile, if they were really to try to balance the budget – by some combination of spending cuts and tax reform that would increase revenues – they’d risk being voted out. Voters like their government programs, but they don’t want to pay for them.

Ultimately, the investors who are financing the national debt will get their money. So will soldiers and veterans, though not enough.

Also pretty certain is that the costs will be passed on to our children and grandchildren. Kids don’t vote, and they don’t donate money to campaigns. They depend on older generations to look out for their interests.

We’ve all apparently decided not to vote for that.

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Last Monday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson decided to end Arkansas’ participation in the state’s current end-of-the-year Common Core PARCC exam, despite the fact that the State Board of Education had voted to do the opposite. It was only the fourth biggest story of the week.

That’s how much there was to talk about. The Supreme Court’s rulings on gay marriage and the Affordable Care Act, plus the Confederate flag issue, all were more newsworthy than Common Core, which usually gets people’s attention.

These issues run deep. For many Americans, gay marriage is either a fundamental human right, or it’s an attack on traditional marriage and a sin. Obamacare is an acceptable expansion of health insurance, or it’s a government takeover. Great-great-grandfather fought nobly for the South, or Great-great-grandfather was a slave.

There was an air of finality to last week’s developments. Gay marriage is now legal everywhere, and it’s also supported by a growing majority of Americans, particularly those under 30, so politicians calling for massive resistance won’t accomplish much if their goal is to make it illegal again. Obamacare is now firmly entrenched in the health care system, especially with this latest Supreme Court decision. To substantively change anything at the federal level, Republicans would have to win the White House, the House and a 60-vote majority in the Senate, an almost impossible task given the math in 2016. Then they would have to coalesce behind an alternative, which would be even harder. The Confederate flag has far fewer defenders than it did a couple of weeks ago. It’s been removed from Alabama’s Capitol, and even NASCAR’s chairman said he wants his sport “disassociated” from it.

But the arguments will continue, as they always do in a democracy. The debate over gay marriage now shifts to the extent that private individuals and businesses can be compelled by government force to accept it. Obamacare will be the focus of more litigation, and House Republicans will continue to stage votes to repeal it. Regardless of what happens to the Confederate symbol, far deeper substantive divisions will remain over race, justice, and the meaning of the past.

One of the things that’s most frustrating about American politics is that there are issues where we could agree, at least about the problem, if we gave it a shot. Most of us would say it’s wrong to keep adding to the national debt that we’re passing on to our kids, and because money doesn’t grow on trees, the government must over time collect as much money as it spends. We should agree that the country should maintain its highways, control its borders, and manage an orderly immigration system.

Unfortunately, we often can’t take meaningful action on these important areas where we could agree because the debate is so clouded by those important areas where we’ll never agree. Republicans and Democrats in Washington have become like a married couple that can’t stop fighting over the in-laws long enough to call 9-1-1 about their kitchen that’s on fire. Even a commonsense issue like the national debt, which must be addressed by a series of difficult but doable mathematical compromises, becomes enmeshed in the culture war. It’s hard to work with the other guy when you’ve told your supporters he’s a communist or a Nazi.

Increasingly, these United States are looking much more divided, much more tribal, and much more us versus them. Too many of our daily conversations, the media we consume, and our Facebook posts – my goodness, the Facebook posts – are marked by mocking, scornful attitudes towards entire groups of people, often based on beliefs.

And that’s a little scary. You can’t really believe in freedom unless you believe in freedom for those who are different than you, and that’s hard to do for someone you don’t respect. The next step after contempt is control, and control tends to spread like a virus that starts in one part of the body and then multiples until everything is infected.

We’re not all going to get along, but, like a lot of difficult marriages, we can meet in the middle as often as possible for the sake of our kids. No one ever said living in a free society would be easy, but Someone did once say, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” So peace be unto you, even when we don’t agree, and even when we can’t.

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

As Benjamin Franklin was leaving Independence Hall at the end of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked him if the delegates had created a republic or a monarchy. According to notes written by Dr. James McHenry, a Maryland delegate, Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

He did not say “democracy,” which the Founding Fathers saw as “mob rule.” Instead, they created a republic, where the people have ultimate authority by electing their officials but don’t stand in town squares and raise their hands to decide national issues.

Given that history, should elected officials vote their consciences, or should they follow popular opinion? Both, if they are doing their jobs. They should listen to their constituents and give great weight to their wishes, but if all they do is stick their fingers in the air and then follow the political winds, why should they exist? Why not just post every question currently facing Congress on the internet and let us all vote by clicking? How much funding should the Central Intelligence Agency receive this year? Click.

The character quality that’s needed, and the one that’s been missing far too long, is leadership. Elected officials must be willing to make tough calls, explain their decisions, and then accept the consequences. In some countries, if you lose power, you die. Egypt, for example, recently sentenced its previous president, Mohammed Morsi, to execution. In the United States, former Sen. Mark Pryor became a well-paid lobbyist after being “deposed,” as did Blanche Lincoln, Tim Hutchinson and many others.

And that brings us to the national debt. I think I first wrote about the subject in 1992, and frankly, I’m getting tired of trying to convince you people to be concerned about it. But I’ll try again. The debt has reached $18.2 trillion – roughly $57,000 for every American man, woman and child. It’s partly financed by foreign creditors, which is a really stupid idea. The government has many trillions of dollars in assets and is not bankrupt. But this is a growing problem because the government has made many trillions of dollars’ worth of promises that it cannot keep.

A number of groups – the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Concord Coalition, the Committee for a Responsible Budget – are trying to educate the American people about the debt, and, just as with my columns, it’s not getting through. Americans know no entity can indefinitely spend more than it collects and are concerned about the debt in the abstract, but they oppose specific cuts and don’t want to raise (their own) taxes. It’s hard to balance a budget if you don’t decrease outgo and/or raise income.

Anyway, democracy often doesn’t reflect the will of the majority on a particular issue, but the will of the loudest and most committed less-than-majorities. Any spending cut or tax increase will attract fierce opposition by the groups most affected. What matters is not what 51 percent want. What matters is what 15 percent want that the other 85 percent won’t fight for.

The debt is not the kind of issue that leads Americans to march on the Capitol. It’s a terrible injustice that affects mostly people who are too young to do anything about it. There will never be a groundswell of support for paying it down, even though the alternative is leaving it to our kids and grandkids, which surely few of us want to do.

Because there’s never going to be a groundswell, elected officials must lead. They must make tough decisions that they explain to the public, and then they either will be re-elected, or they will lose and become lobbyists. No one will lop off their head if they raise the gas tax or cut a program somewhere.

It takes a special person to do this, because apparently it’s very tempting in Washington to do whatever it takes to be re-elected. These types of republic-leaders can’t get elected without support. They need campaign donations – in larger increments from those who can, and in smaller increments from the concerned common man. I really wish those groups I mentioned, or at least their allies, would start playing a little more hardball.

There’s been enough talk about this subject. A few of us must lead, and a few more of us must have their backs. And if the American people won’t accept that this republic can’t keep going into debt, then I guess we won’t be able to keep it.