RUTHFULLY YOURS

In offering himself as the next speaker of the House after last Tuesday’s sea-change election, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed of about 800 words. The word “debt” is not one of them, nor does the concept appear. That’s a bit odd, no?

The debt is what the election was about: the growth-killing tab that runs up another $4 billion every day — even days when President Obama is not touring the Far East with 3,000 courtiers in his retinue. The debt, driven by unconstitutional and unsustainable federal intrusions into everything from how much carbon dioxide we emit to which light bulbs we use, is what in turn drives unemployment. The debt, coupled with government’s insatiable appetite for ever-greater control, is what impels the Obama campaign to tax every morsel of achievement, effort, and choice. As former Reagan official Peter Ferrara explains in President Obama’s Tax Piracy, a new pamphlet in Encounter’s Broadside series, production and employment have ground to a halt as a “natural result of the incentive effects” created by the swirl of confiscation and uncertainty.

Yet, Mr. Boehner is focused like a laser on#…#earmarks. They are, he says, “a symbol of a broken Washington.” Okay, but they are also less than one 1 percent of our unfathomable $3.8 trillion budget. The problem is not the symbols, it is the broken Washington.

It took the United States over 190 years from the start of constitutional governance to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. We now add a tril every nine months or so. At the start of World War II, our public debt stood at about $43 billion. That averaged out to $370 per American. On Election Day last week, with a population nearly three times as large, each American’s share had exploded to $44,370 — and counting. Accumulated public debt now hovers near $14 trillion, and that’s only if we use the farcically forgiving math by which Washington insulates itself from the accounting rigors it foists on the real world.

Americans in the private sector (i.e., members of the public who create the value on which the “public servants” feast) get prosecuted for fraud when they doctor the books, even if it is to shroud an imperceptible fraction of what Uncle Sam hides: tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities that push into the hundreds of thousands of dollars the true per capita burden we bear, as will our children and our children’s children. Just ask any Bernie, from Ebbers to Madoff: If you fail to heed the SEC’s disclosure regulations, you go to jail. And what of the regs for government disclosure, like the Freedom of Information Act? Strangely enough, the Treasury Department is currently looking to hire FOIA experts with experience in using “exemptions to withhold information from the public.”

But let’s pretend that the debt is really only $14 trillion. Two-thirds of that staggering sum has been run up since 1991, when Boehner was first elected to the House. About half of it has been added since 2006, when Mr. Boehner became GOP leader. Obviously, Democrats have been running the show in Congress throughout Boehner’s leadership years, and they’ve controlled both political branches for the last two. The congressman doesn’t come close to making the Most Wanted list when it comes to assessing blame for our sorry condition. But neither do earmarks.

The “broken Washington” Mr. Boehner deplores is the Washington that doesn’t know its place and has no respect for the limits the Constitution imposes on its rapacious tendencies. It’s the Washington that produces central-planning programs like “No Child Left Behind.” That’s the 2002 Bush administration initiative that Boehner, then chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Work Force, regards as his signature legislative achievement. By contrast, as the Cato Institute pointed out in a 2007 analysis of NCLB, even the administration of Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged that the Constitution provides no role for the national government in schooling, that “education is a matter reserved for the states.”

The grassroots uprising that has brought Boehner to the cusp of becoming speaker did not sweep the Republicans into power. It swept the Democrats out of power. Just as a similar wave swept Republicans out of power in 2006. The common denominator for both expulsions is the mind-blowing expansion of government, accompanied by a mind-blowing accumulation of debt. In the two centuries-plus before Pres. George W. Bush took office, the debt grew to $5.7 trillion. In just eight years, he added almost $5 trillion more.

Voters have just made congressional Democrats a rarer species because Obama’s breakneck spending and governmental metastasis make Bush look like a piker. That, however, does not mean Americans have suddenly fallen in love with Republicans. It means they have reluctantly given Republicans a second chance, finding them to be the only alternative readily available, and hoping the GOP’s stalwart opposition to Obama’s worst excesses means something more worthy than political opportunism is at play. But they are by no means convinced.

To put it mildly, Boehner’s got a lot to prove. His pose as anti-earmarks crusader is underwhelming, even as complemented by his call for a few good-government reforms to streamline legislation and make the process of passing it transparent. These are fine, as far as they go, but they go no farther than putting band-aids on a cancer. What we really want to know — particularly those of us who are skeptical about the GOP’s seriousness of purpose — is where he and the party stand on debt and on the role of government in our lives.

Very soon, Leviathan’s credit card will be tapped out. Shortly after President Obama took office, Congress quietly raised the debt ceiling from $12.3 trillion to $14.2 trillion — an amount that strategically evaded the need to come back for more just before the midterm elections. At its current rate of profligacy, however, the government will steamroll past the current limit within a few months. It will need a new, higher max-out to keep the gravy train rolling. So, like clockwork, the punditocracy is in high dudgeon, warning the speaker-to-be and other GOP leaders: Don’t even think about not raising the cap. Unless the ceiling is raised, we’re told, life will end, the government will collapse, the global economy will sink into deep depression, the unemployed may have to make do on less than 99 weeks of “insurance,” etc. Go along, or prepare to be smeared as reckless maniacs. In short, it’s TARP time all over again.

Only in Washington is withdrawing a bankrupt debtor’s credit line deemed a form of dementia while running up nearly $10 trillion in red ink over a decade, with trillions more coming annually as far as the eye can see, is seen as perfectly rational. To the rest of the country — that would be the people who said “No You Can’t” to the “Yes We Can” crowd on Tuesday — grappling responsibly with bankruptcy means you are forced to pay down your debt and make the hard choices about what to stop spending on.

That will involve a lot more than ending earmarks.

– Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.