You know how tea party Republicans are showing True Political Courage by bravely defending unpopular spending cuts?
Well:
Almost all Republicans and some Democrats will vote to alter the Constitution when the issue comes up as early as this week. Almost none, including a leading co-sponsor of the Senate measure, Orrin Hatch, and Bill Flores of Texas, a co-sponsor of the House measure, say how they’d slash Medicare, eliminate federal programs or shrink education, law enforcement or national defense. [...] Hatch, a Utah Republican facing re-election in 2012, wouldn’t offer specifics on entitlement cuts or say which federal departments he would close to reach a balanced budget. “When the time comes, I’ll name them,” said Hatch. “I don’t want to do it right now, because we have to pass that amendment.” [...] Representative Flores, a freshman Republican, said he couldn’t name specific cuts “off the top of my head.” Identifying cuts isn’t necessary at this point, he said, because the voters aren’t “trying to get down in the weeds on where the cuts would come. They want the balanced- budget amendment.”
And then there's this:
Asked what cuts he would make to comply with a constitutional amendment, Representative Allen West, a first-year Republican from Florida, didn’t cite specific programs yet pointed to a Government Accountability Office study earlier this year that identified “about $200 billion of duplicative and redundant government programs.”
Great! We can cut $200 billion a year without losing any services, right? Except the GAO report didn't actually put a price tag on the programs. $200 billion is the upper-range of an estimate by Tom Coburn based on the report. So if West had wanted to be accurate, he'd have said that a fellow Republican politician claimed the report showed between $100 and $200 billion of spending on redundant programs. But even if that number was accurate, you still couldn't cut all of that spending without also eliminating services. If I buy two hamburgers for lunch, and I only need one, I could have saved the cost of one of the hamburgers, not both.
If these guys really had political courage, they'd stand straight up and say that George Bush's job-killing tax cuts were the worst fiscal policy decision in our nation's history. Instead, they're proposing a hopeless Constitutional amendment to score cheap political points without taking any responsibility for actually getting something done.