The budget battle's narrow terms

It's great to see David Beckmann convince Mark Bittman to join the fast against attempts to cut federal programs
that help the poor and the hungry. Bittman's dismissal of the religious element
of the effort by Bread for the World and others--"I doubt God will intervene
here"--betrays his unfamiliarity with Christian thought. (I'm tempted to send him
one of my ELCA "God's work, our hands" fridge magnets.) But thanks to Bittman's
involvement, now even the Nation is
giving the progressive evangelical effort positive coverage.

I'm ambivalent about using the prophets to (somewhat awkwardly)
prooftext a publicity stunt. It raises complicated questions about the
relationship between a spiritual fast and a political hunger strike. But right
now those questions seem a lot less important than the fact that apparently the
only way to evade a government shutdown--not such a great thing, though there are worse things--is for the Democrats
to give the Republicans what they want: major cuts to non-defense discretionary
spending. That would be devastating for a lot of vulnerable people.

There's nothing like a divided-government budget fight to
highlight the insanity of U.S. politics. In a time of tenuous economic
recovery, we should be having a serious debate about our complicated policy
options. Do we need more stimulus before we turn to the deficit problem? If
not, should we tackle the deficit by cutting spending, raising taxes or some
combination? If we go with just cuts, which parts of the budget should they
come from?

Each of these is a serious and difficult question. But
the national debate has largely glossed over them, skipping ahead to a focus on
cuts to non-defense discretionary spending--the relatively small slice of the
budget pie that happens to include lots of programs aimed at mitigating
slightly the staggering gap (pdf) between the haves and
have-nots. It's a conversation with narrow parameters: should we make deep cuts
to this spending? Or should we make even deeper ones?

The White House recently floated an offer consisting of
more than $30 billion in total cuts. That's the amount the Republican
leadership proposed as its opening bid, but a couple months later they wouldn't even take it as a compromise--because
the White House offer consisted only mostly, instead of entirely, of cuts to
discretionary spending. It's easy to forget that the Democrats control two of
the three bodies of government involved here.

A sane national politics wouldn't pivot on a conversation
that's ostensibly about the deficit but is limited to cuts to relatively small
programs. It wouldn't take seriously the idea that you can somehow counteract
the deficit by neutering a health-care reform law that
actually saves the government money.
It wouldn't make farm subsidies sacrosanct.

Our elected officials may still reach a compromise that keeps the
government from shutting down, something Democrats can praise for being less
bad for poor people than it might have been. And I'm pleased that a bipartisan
bill to establish an itemized tax receipt was
introduced in the Senate; maybe it'll get a hearing once the dust
settles. That could bring some sanity to how we talk about
government spending.

But what will it take for our culture to stop blaming its most marginalized members for
their own situation--and punishing them for problems they didn't cause?