Ryan Streeter
How many times have you heard the expression “We cannot kick the can down the road any longer” (or some variant thereof) in the past month or two?
The anti-can-kickers include the President, leaders in both parties, and just about everyone else in Congress, too. Everyone is determined NOT to kick the can down the road anymore on the budget, entitlements and the other big issues.
Nevertheless, that sound of aluminum you hear is a can bouncing atop the asphalt next to you. There’s plenty of can-kicking going on in Washington right now.
Here are the top three can-kickers of the week.
President Obama kicks the can on Libya. “Dithering” has been a word frequently used to describe his stance on Libya. He sent conflicting messages and then disappeared during the early violence in Libya when rebels stood a chance, and now has re-emerged to pledge a full-throated commitment to following – following Britain, France, the Arab League and the UN’s no-fly zone decision yesterday. This can bouncing along the road could be very expensive can-kicking indeed. If we were worried about what initial imposition of a no-fly zone would cost, the odds it costing more were always higher the longer we waited.
Harry Reid kicks the can on Social Security. In an effort to get out in front of Republicans talking entitlement reform, Harry Reid has grown more insistent that Social Security is just fine as it is. He’s signaling what the Senate will do to Republican proposals to reform the program. With all the poise of a cowboy poet, Harry Reid has already got his leg back….waiting for the right moment to let the can fly.
Congress kicks the can on the budget. I sometimes envision House Republicans behind closed doors talking about their Pledge To America: “What were we thinking? Whose idea was it to put that $100 billion figure in there?” The longer Democratic resistance to cuts endures, the harder it makes it for Republicans to get their proportioned goal of $61 billion in cuts – and the Dems are well aware of how that could create a mini-civil war on the right (we already saw it start to break out over the CR vote this week). So the can keeps getting kicked down the road on the budget. To be fair, no one’s kicking this can down the road on purpose among Republicans. But they’re in a place now where the Democrats seem to be enjoying a little sly kicking of their own as a way to keep the Republicans off-balance.
My big hope is that when Paul Ryan releases his budget, we’ll at least have a discussion in the open about who the can-kickers on the deficit are, and who they aren’t. But who knows at this point. If Harry Reid is any picture of what's to come, there will be plenty of can-kickers pretending theres no can to be kicked...as they look the other way and then give it a boot.
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