By James D. Besser
Washington — Here’s some free advice for American Jewish leaders, especially those whose organizations provide critical health and social services: Start saving your shekels.
Hit up new contributors. Hold bake sales. Cut expenses and make sure your programs are as efficient as possible. Start putting money in the bank. You’re going to need it.
More and more, congressional Republicans, with the backing of President George W. Bush, are employing a Draconian strategy to force drastic reductions in the size of government by ensuring budget-breaking deficits.
These will eventually leave their colleagues no choice but to cut even popular programs to the bone. Democrats, fearful of being called tax-and-spend liberals, are doing little to limit the carnage.
As conservative guru and administration adviser Grover Norquist said in a recent U.S. News interview: “The goal is reducing the size and scope of government over time by draining its lifeblood.”
Many conservative theoreticians have been saying similar things for years. Past attempts to reduce the size of the federal government have always run afoul of special interest politics, they say. Even President Reagan didn’t put much of a dent in the federal establishment during his eight-year reign.
That calls for strong, bitter medicine, some argue — like deficits that could shock Congress into wielding the budget-cutting axe with abandon.
Economist Milton Friedman last year argued that deficits may not be good, but they can serve a useful purpose by creating a fiscal emergency that will generate enough pressure to overcome political resistance to drastic cuts.
Forcing choice
It is unclear if that was President Bush’s motive in proposing a series of huge tax cuts, but it is clearly a major reason so many Republican leaders supported the cuts, despite their party’s traditional aversion to deficits.
It would be unfair to blame all of the new tide of red ink — this week the Congressional Budget Office predicted a record $480 billion deficit in 2004 — on the Bush tax cuts. The recession, the drop in the stock market since the boom of the 1990s and job losses all helped reduce federal revenues.
But most experts say the Bush tax cuts are a significant factor in today’s record deficit and likely to become even more important in the years to come as the cuts are implemented.
That appears to be exactly what many conservatives had in mind all along — creating fiscal conditions that will force harsh choices for lawmakers at every level: enact sweeping, painful spending cuts to domestic programs, or face deficits that could reach the stratosphere, saddling the next generation with a crushing economic penalty for the failings of the one now in power.
Barring a record-breaking economic recovery — which few economists see in the nation’s future — the conservative strategy for decimating federal programs appears on track to success.
Jewish social service agencies have already started cutting back services and staff in response to shrinking government funding. They are highly vulnerable as the budget morass deepens.
Nobody has good estimates of the proportion of Jewish social service funding that comes from federal, state and local governments. But most experts agree that the number has grown enormously in recent years, enabling Jewish agencies to provide better and more extensive services.
These agencies serving the elderly, poor, infirm and other vulnerable groups will face deep, potentially crippling funding cuts as Congress starts to confront the deficit.
At the same time, those agencies will face rising demand for services because of the nation’s economic problems and because many government programs that used to provide help have been or will soon be cut.
And the government cuts will come at a time when Jewish fundraising has been flat — itself a victim of the sour economy, as well as the growing tendency of Jewish philanthropists to give to non-Jewish charities.
The crunch will be all the more painful as dozens of states respond to their own fiscal emergencies, and as more and more federal programs are block granted to the states — with reduced funding.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) has spent much of the summer formulating plans for an emergency political mobilization to protect critical safety net programs.
The pending budget crisis, leaders of the group say, demands the same kind of all-out, community-wide effort that has made the pro-Israel lobby a model for other communities. That effort could prove critical as the nation plunges into uncharted budget territory.
Former Madisonian James Besser has been Washington correspondent for the New York Jewish Week, the Baltimore Jewish Times and other leading Anglo-Jewish newspapers for 15 years.
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