Collender: Pawlenty is “Not Ready for Prime Time”

When Tucker Carlson’s new publication, The Daily Caller, asked Tim Pawlenty if he wanted to write an article on the long-term federal budget deficit he should have just said “no.” Instead, by agreeing to write such a piece he implicitly committed himself to outlining some kind of realistic idea on the subject. Instead what he came up with is an embarrassment that leads Stan Collender to conclude that the piece “shows he’s not ready for prime time when it comes to the federal budget.”

The centerpiece of Pawlenty’s “plan” is this:

Balancing the budget will require some tough decisions. Congress must reduce discretionary spending in real terms, with exceptions for key programs such as military, veterans, and public safety. The Congress must also reject costly new spending initiatives, like new health care entitlements.

Collender writes that “Someone needs to tell Pawlenty that discretionary spending except for ‘military, veterans, and public safety’ is less than $400 billion a year.” On January 4, the Wall Street Journal reported that “The federal government’s budget deficit reached $389 billion through the first three months of fiscal 2010, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said Thursday [...] The deficit reached a record high of $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009, more than triple the previous high set just the previous year.”

Try running the math on that.

If I were planning on running for election, I might not be comfortable saying “to deal with the long-term federal budget deficit we need higher taxes and we need to slow the growth of Medicare spending.” But if you’re not willing to say “we need higher taxes and we need to slow the growth of Medicare spending” then you shouldn’t run around talking about the long-term federal budget deficit. There’s really nothing else to say about it.