PolitiFact (PF) Ohio starts out this recent ruling with a question: “If you cut out cigarettes and coffee but used the money to pay for a vacation, would you really be saving money?” My answer: yes, especially if you would have had to put the vacation on your credit card if you hadn’t cut out the cigarettes and coffee. But we are not talking about vacations here.
Republican Representative Jim Jordan was awarded a Mostly True by PolitiFact for an allegation along these lines in an op-ed piece in U.S.A. Today. Specifically, he said:
What is the “mission” of Obama’s initiative? From his executive order:Politicians are so addicted to spending, they can't even avoid the temptation to spend savings from relatively minor budget cuts. President Obama's recent plan to cut $100 million of waste within his administration won't actually save money because he's going to spend it elsewhere.
The New York Times also pointed out that the “savings” were going to be used elsewhere and not to relieve debt.The mission of the Initiative is to monitor and promote agency progress in making Government work better, faster, and more efficiently.
On Wednesday, President Obama signed an executive order cutting federal spending on things like promotional plaques and mugs, cellphones and iPads, official travel, and chauffeured cars for senior officials.
“It doesn’t replace the importance of the work that Congress needs to do in coming up with a balanced, bold plan to reduce our deficit,” Mr. Obama said in a ceremony in the Oval Office, “but it indicates once again that there are things we can do right now that will actually deliver better government more efficiently.”
In fact, the administration said, only a small portion of the $4 billion in annual savings will go toward reducing the deficit. Rather, the money will be spent on other programs, like helping veterans re-enter the work force or improving the nation’s infrastructure, which the White House contends are more worthwhile.
I guess the Republicans have two competing party views of the nature of money, especially if you have a Republican who’s both a social and fiscal conservative. Because it’s fungible when it comes to paying for abortion (the social side), but in this case, it’s not fungible when it comes to paying off debt (the fiscal side). To which I say, you can’t have it both ways.
On the abortion side, the fungibility factor is much more convoluted because it mixes public and private. Government funds cannot pay for abortion, but the argument goes that because some women have the government paying the rest of their medical insurance, they now have the money available to pay for abortion coverage if they want to buy it privately from the insurance company.
On the fiscal side, Obama wants to spend the savings from these efficiency measures on other programs he deems worthwhile: although I know these programs are non-discretionary, the money which funds them still belongs to the taxpayer, it’s still in the public realm. The other issue is that the government is not like a business: when a cost or income center of a business is under-spending its budget, especially when the business is getting close to reporting profit, it’s often required to defer expenses and avoid spending the “shortage” so that the company can meet certain profit projections. In other cases, where they haven’t reported yet, they might spend the money wherever they can (on things both worthwhile and not), because under-spending often invites a cut to the budget when it is generated for the following year. The government operates more along the line of the latter, and that’s what Obama appears to be doing, and his expenditures are worthwhile.
But to get back to fungibility of funds in the government: Jim Jordan is looking at “budget cuts” in absolutist terms. He thinks the monies saved should go straight to paying off debt. If these other programs Obama is using the money for are on the budget and operational, where does he think the money for those are coming from? In other words, it’s like Obama cut out the “coffee and cigarettes” to pay the dentist bill, but Jordan wants him to put that money toward the credit card, so now Obama has to use the credit card to pay the dentist, so now we are back where we started. PF writer Steve Koff uses “vacation” instead of “dentist” because “vacation” looks like more of a wasteful expenditure. (In certain respects, dentist is better because it’s a lot like “infrastructure” one of the items mentioned in the PF ruling.) The things Obama was using the money for did not appear to be the likes of a “vacation.”
The other matter is efficiency. Jordan should want the government to deliver the most “bang for the taxpayers’ bucks” regardless of what Obama does with the money saved (if Obama did something crazy with the savings, I'm sure it wouldn't get past the Republicans). And I guess I have to go into “tu quoque” mode here: why wasn’t Bush doing this? In the ideological view, “conservative” means this should have been right up Bush’s alley.
So just because Obama is spending savings “elsewhere” doesn’t mean he isn’t saving money, and that other spending might have well been put on the nation’s credit card if Obama didn’t have the savings. We shouldn’t have had such waste in previous administrations, we shouldn’t have such waste in future administrations. Jordan contorted some reasonably good fiscal strategies by Obama to make him look bad. He doesn’t deserve a Mostly True because he completely misrepresented what Obama was doing: Jordan's statement contained some elements of truth but ignored critical facts which would give a different impression.
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