Please. This might have been OK when the nation was staring into the void, but it's impossible to justify now. Can proponents really say "emergency" with a straight face? The only "emergency" about the most expensive item in the bill -- the $85 billion doc fix -- is that Congress has waited until the last minute to fix it. Without action, Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors will drop about 21 percent next Tuesday. Will doctors who already feel pinched by Medicare pay rates cut back on Medicare patients? Um, yeah. Could Congress have seen this coming months or years ago, and planned for it? Um, yeah.
The doc fix isn't the only piece of spending that's more a political emergency than a real one. The bill would provide $4.6 billion to settle class action suits by African-American farmers and Indian tribes. Worthy spending, but if they're important, why shouldn't these be paid for by cutting something else? Ditto $1 billion for a summer jobs program for people 16 to 21, and another $1 billion so the National Housing Trust Fund can build, preserve and rehab low-income rental homes.
At a time when the unemployment rate is 9.9 percent and people who lose jobs are likely to be without work for record periods, there's certainly a case to be made for extending unemployment benefits and the COBRA health insurance subsidy to the end of this year. But it's time to start paying for this, and if it would harm the recovery to pay for it right away, why not lock in payments over the next five years?
Budgeting is about choices, and as long as Congress can keep putting new spending on the tab, members don't have to weigh priorities and decide which ones are really important. That's unsustainable.
This week's bills, which also include a Senate proposal to spend another $45.4 billion in borrowed money to send more troops to Afghanistan, are just a small warm up for what Congress will have to do if it's serious about really getting the deficit under control. This week it's billions -- that will be about trillions, and it will have to go to places such as Social Security, defense, Medicare and substantial taxes.
Does anyone seriously think Congress will be able to do that if it can't even do something as comparatively puny as this?
George Hager is a member of the USA Today editorial board.
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