Though "the Great Recession" might have technically ended last year, its political reverberations have grown only more intense. This is especially the case for Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats who, having lost control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, are struggling to balance their ever-present desire for expanded government with public demands for fiscal responsibility.
Prior to the midterms, Democrats could use their majorities to ignore calls for small government policies, but doing so today would only further inflame a movement across the country holding the Obama administration accountable.
Nowhere is this pattern more evident than on the state level. The governors of over 25 states have filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare and its claim that government can tax individuals for doing nothing.
Education reform, long the exclusive domain of liberal intellectuals too timid to actually bring about meaningful change, has become a key battleground in states like Wisconsin and New Jersey to wrestle control of public schools back from bloated and corrupt teachers unions. In Florida, as well as in several other states recently, money sent from the federal government to be spent on unnecessary, unwanted and tremendously expensive "infrastructure" projects has been returned in order to help reduce waste.
Despite tremendous political risk, state governments have cut back on the size and budgets of state agencies, with many governors incurring the wrath of public employee unions for simply trying to rein in spending. As unfortunate as the recession was, it at the very least encouraged people and reminded them of the need for fiscal responsibility.
As much as we wish the government would pay to get rid of every imaginable social ill, we know that doing so is neither feasible nor desirable. People should take care of their own problems, not Congress.
Amid all of this, the federal government is still largely in the hands of Democrats who are unwilling or unable to embrace serious spending restraints. Indeed, given the Obama administration's ongoing mission to be as oblivious as possible to responsible fiscal policy, time has shown that Congressional Democrats maintain a surprising ability to propose legislation that does exactly the opposite of what the public wants: reign in the size of government.
A trillion dollars was spent on a stimulus package that did not work, one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world was essentially nationalized, and the healthcare system was restructured so as to fall further under the purview of the federal government.
The economy remains stagnant with unemployment still unacceptably high, and now Obama has proposed a governmental budget that does next to nothing to curb spending.
Despite having appointed a bipartisan fiscal commission last year to explore ways government can reduce its size and costs, the administration in characteristic fashion ignored almost all of the panel's recommendations. This was particularly the case with entitlement reform, where rather then tackle by far one of the largest sources of government waste, Obama ignored the issue altogether.
When pushed on the matter, Obama's only response was to claim that the media, the public, Washington and everyone who was not him, essentially, was too impatient. The reality, however, is that Obama's claims of wielding a scalpel rather than a machete when dealing with the budget do nothing when handling a government that has grown too large for too long. In the present case, a machete is precisely what is needed.
Government should not be and cannot be in the business of making every disenfranchised group, whether real or imagined, feel more comfortable, and the taxpayer cannot continue to pay for entitlement programs that do just that. Such programs are irresponsible even when times are going well, much less when the economy continues to flail.
Of course, it would have been nice if Obama had addressed the issue at all, rather than wait to see if Republicans in Congress were willing to take up the politically dangerous issue.
Despite the necessity for entitlement reform, Democrats have made it a party tradition to vilify and chastise any politician who tries to enact it.
President Bush experienced that very real tactic when he proposed a partially privatized social security system that gave more control to individuals and less to bureaucrats. Democrats in Congress claimed that the President was out to attack vulnerable seniors and rob them of their nest eggs, while taking the rug out from underneath middle-class families. None of that was true of course, but it was politically devastating enough to ensure that entitlement reform policies remained on the back burner for nearly a half dozen years.
The issue is back, however, and must be tackled by both parties if the United States is ever going to regain its financial footing. The country needs and wants a smaller, more efficient government: scaling back on unnecessary entitlement programs is an essential way to get there.