The title of the Professor's recent blog post is "Eat the Future" and the metaphor is apt. Because no one wants to sacrifice in the present, eating the future is the only choice left:
The public says it wants to see government spending cut — and the Tea Partiers really, really want spending cut — but people don’t want to cut any program they like; and they like almost everything. What’s a conservative to do?And he follows with a list of proposed cuts. Check it out; it's stunningly cynical. (Want a taste? How about trimming almost a billion from the Center for Disease Control.)
The obvious answer, once you think about it, is to eat the future: to cut spending in a way that undermines the nation’s long-run prospects, but doesn’t impose all that much pain on voters right now.
And that, as best as I can tell, is the running theme in the cuts proposed by House Republicans. The proposal is, deliberately I think, hard to read and interpret; I hope and assume that the good folks at CBPP will do the detail soon. But on a quick read, here are some of the cuts that jumped out at me[.]
Paraphrasing Tom Waits, the future's not around to defend itself. That makes it a terribly easy target.
GP
