Bunning’s Best Game
It was Father’s Day, 1964, when the Phillies’ Jim Bunning, a father of seven, took the mound against the Mets.
Ninety pitches later, Bunning had struck out 10 and allowed not one batter to reach first base. Twenty-seven up, 27 down. The first perfect game in 86 years in the National League, and the finest hour of the Hall of Famer’s baseball career.
Beginning last week, Jim Bunning took the Senate floor for five straight days to object to Harry Reid’s call for unanimous consent to waive through a $10 billion spending bill. First, the Kentucky senator demanded, show me how we’re going to pay for it.
His own leadership abandoned Bunning. Susan Collins of Maine assured the Senate and country that Republicans did not back their colleague: “Senator Bunning’s views do not represent a majority of the caucus. It’s important that the American people understand that there is bipartisan support for extending these vital programs.”
Vital programs?
Had Bunning blocked rescue flights to Port au Prince or Santiago, or ammunition for the Marines in Marja?
No. Bunning had held up for a couple of days a vote on a $10 billion bill to extend unemployment benefits, make payments to doctors under Medicare and extend satellite TV to rural America. Reportedly, some 2,000 Transportation Department workers were furloughed for a few days.
“If we cannot pay for a bill that all 100 senators support,” Bunning said, “how can we tell the American people with a straight face that we will ever pay for anything?”
Good question.
Indeed, the behavior of senators suggests that neither party appreciates the depth of the crisis we are in or the pain that will be required to get us out. Last week, Bunning did more than any senator in many moons to raise the consciousness of the country to the magnitude of the deficit-debt crisis.
His taking to the barricades may have inconvenienced some, but Bunning forced us all, briefly, to stare into the chasm.
Consider. Congress this year will spend $1.6 trillion more than it collects in revenue, with the largest outlays in that FY 2010 budget for defense at $719 billion and Social Security at $721 billion.
Thus, if the U.S. Government on Oct. 1, 2008, had shut down the Pentagon and furloughed every soldier and civilian here and around the world, and announced that it would not send out a Social Security check for a full year to any of the 50 million retired and elderly, we would still be $160 billion short of balancing the budget. If you zeroed out federal benefits to veterans for a full year, that, added in, would bring us close.
Such is the magnitude of the fiscal crisis facing the country.
To balance the budget this year would require a 43 percent across-the-board cut in every category of federal spending — defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Homeland Security, highways, etc. — or, if one used taxes alone, a 72-percent increase in federal tax revenues.
Budget cuts of that magnitude are impossible. They would cause a revolution. And any attempt at tax hikes of that magnitude would drain off all available consumer capital and hurl the economy into another Depression.
For the foreseeable future, then, this nation is going deeper into debt
And when Harry Reid and colleagues wave through yet another $10 billion for unemployment checks and making sure farm folks get yard dishes to see reruns of “The Sopranos,” the United States must go to Beijing, Tokyo or Riyadh and borrow the money.
That is the hole we are in.
And when one stares at some of those budget numbers, the priorities of the Obama administration seem almost surreal.
In George W. Bush’s last full year in office, we spent $29 billion for “international affairs.” The lion’s share of that was foreign aid. In FY 2011, the year for which Congress has begun to budget, spending for international affairs and foreign aid is to jump to $54 billion and continue to surge through the Obama years.
What is the rationale for the United States, the world’s greatest debtor nation, putting itself deeper in debt to China to send foreign aid to nations that will never repay us and that vote habitually with China and against us in the United Nations?
This city does not seem to grasp that the days of wine and roses are over. We are not in the 1950s or 1960s anymore. Then, we could throw open our markets to imports from the world. Then, we could dish out foreign aid and fight wars in Vietnam with 500,000 men, while maintaining 50,000 troops in Korea and 300,000 in Europe.
America is headed for a time when, like the British Empire, she is going to have to make painful choices, or have them forced upon us.
He may have been booed all last week, but Jim Bunning pitched one of the best games of his career.
Bunning is a good man. He deserved to be backed up.
…but Bunning forced us all, briefly, to stare into the chasm.
Too bad he did not have this revelation when he voted for one of the most irresponsible and unfunded financial legislation called Medicare Part D and the two unfunded wars, all of whose costs run into trillions. Oh, I forgot, there was a Republican who was the President at that time.
An excellent article. Dead on, as usual.
Now Jim Bunning joins Sarah Palin status. That is, you are not necessarily wrong if you criticize him, but that should raise a HUGE flag if you feel the need to. Such criticism should cause the rest of us to evaluate just what the naysayers stand for, and why they’re hanging out pretending to be conservative.
Anyone living outside of the Beltway and the precious urban centers of this country knows there is a g-damn recession going on. Let’s get real, extending unemployment benefits is more than a “convenience” for millions of Americans right now, it’s a matter of paying the electric bill and putting gas in the car. I for one don’t mind my tax dollars going to help fellow Americans until this thing is over. I do mind $30 billion of my money going to arm the Israeli government (http://thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/9396/pid/895), but unfortunately Sen. Bunning — who is on his way out of the Senate after his term anyway — never proposed cutting it as an option, nor did he propose any other measure dealing with wasteful defense spending, rampant war profiteering or foreign aid as a remedy.
This was political theater, plain and pathetically simple.He wanted to make a big scene before he went out, and to stick it in the eye of Sen. McConnell, who finally forced him into retirement. I think we have all seen the “chasm,” we didn’t need this bitter pol who did nothing in the last decade to set this country on a better course to show us the way.
Jim Bunning was smart enough to see that cuts had to be made somewhere, and his special, complicated mix of courage and callousness, vision and cowardice, led him to make a stand against the bit of unsustainable spending that was most likely to be stoppable.
Unlike foreign aid, unlike defense, unlike the larger entitlements, unlike the unions, the unemployed don’t have a power base in congress. They are not a constituency to be reckoned with. The irony is that a collapse would affect them the most, but the present-day fact is that they’re already being affected the most.
Was what he did right? I don’t know. As Kelly points out, he’s a hypocrite for not doing it more often, on less important spending, but then again, something is better than nothing.
it was his best game ever but his best inning ever was on August 2, 1959. Bunning struck out three batters on nine pitches in the ninth inning of a 5–4 loss to the Boston Red Sox
Kelly,
I agree. I can remember when candidate PJB argued for extending benefits during a far milder downturn in 1991-92.
Kelley –
“Let’s get real, extending unemployment benefits is more than a “convenience” for millions of Americans right now, it’s a matter of paying the electric bill and putting gas in the car. I for one don’t mind my tax dollars going to help fellow Americans until this thing is over.”
And when is it gonna be over? Who decides that it’s over? What percentage of people have to be able to pay their electric bills and put gas in their car?
And when it’s over, do you think there might be another REALLY IMPORTANT crisis already in progress that you, for one, wouldn’t mind forking over your tax dollars to help your fellow Americans out of? I’ll bet Obama will find you one.
If this is the way you want the government to work, perhaps you could give Congress permanent access to your heartstrings so that it can know at all times what’s the most compassionate thing it can do with money it doesn’t even have yet, or else what other mean and icky things it can cut out of the budget so that it can respond to your preferred crises.
I doubt if Bunning feels the same way about cutting military spending as he does about cutting “liberal” programs. I wish conservatives and liberals would be consistent about how to go about cutting spending, but they are not. Don’t cut my program, cut your waste, instead.
BTW: Social Security is a non-budget item; only its trust-fund is raided by the government for use in the budget. Otherwise, let the cutting begin! I’d start with returning to the tax rates of 1939, adjusted for inflation, of course.
MattSwartz wrote:
“Unlike foreign aid, unlike defense, unlike the larger entitlements, unlike the unions, the unemployed don’t have a power base in congress.”
Mostly true. However, the unemployed still have far more representation than future generations of Americans. They are the ones who ultimately will foot the bill for the irresponsibility of their predecessors.
Social security is self-funded, pay as you go system, and presently still runs a surplus.
To say that there are federal outlays of some $700 billion for social security is, at best, inaccurate and at worst, dishonest. SS presently takes in enough to cover those outlays.
Perhaps Mr. Buchanan is referring to the money that the general budget has borrowed from the SS fund and is paying back. His proposal to stop SS for a year basically is a proposal for the US govt. to default on the treasury notes held by the SS fund and financed by payroll taxes.
Is this what Mr. Buchanan proposes?
American government will never have to make any painful choice regarding its budgets as long as foreign nations are willing to export their products on credit.
Being under pressure from foreign creditors, the U.S. government might reduce the quality of its entitlement programs such as Medicare.
However, that will not bode well with the sick Americans; because, sick Americans love Medicare for all.
On the one hand, the U.S. is not going to reduce its unnecessary military-industrial spending; because, doing so will make America look like a wimp!
On the other hand, any future American president is not gonna do what President Harry Truman did.
Just think for a moment! If President Bush had dropped a few nuclear arsenals in Iraq and Afghanistan and finished those wars immediately, he would not have had any budget deficit in his final four years.
What’s the point of harboring millions of weapons of mass destruction when no future president wants to utilize them?
By dropping a dozen nuclear bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan to end the wars instantly, President Bush could have made him look like the President Harry S. True Man in the history of civilization.
Kelley Vlahos’ comment about Jim Bunning and his tawdry act of political theater is exactly on point. We are in a recession and if Jim felt morally obligated to cut the budget …then he would have done better to cut funding for drone strikes killing poor people halfway across the world in Afghanistan than his choosing to cut poor people’s unemployment benefits in America.