To find out how Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller would fix the federal deficit, I went to his website, www.joemiller.us.
Miller is right to raise the federal deficit as a campaign issue. The deficit was $1.4 trillion in 2009, and is projected to be almost $1.2 trillion this year. This is unsustainable. The old adage, "If a trend can't continue, it won't" comes to mind.
On his website, Miller proposes to end the federal deficit by cutting the federal government back to the "constitutional powers anticipated by our founders," to "return our federal government to the limits prescribed by the Constitution."
He would cut the deficit by applying 18th Century needs and technology to determine 21st Century funding priorities, but he makes one huge exception. Because Social Security and Medicare are the "third rail" of national politics, Miller would continue them for existing recipients, and phase them out for everyone else. So, there would be no immediate savings there.
I did the math, and you can too. The clearest presentation of the federal budget is on Wikipedia. The current federal budget is $3,550 billion. Estimated federal receipts (i.e., tax revenues) are $2,381 billion, leaving a projected 2010 deficit of $1,169 billion.
Of the $3,550 billion total, $2,184 billion is for Social Security and Medicare payments, interest on the national debt and relief from natural disasters. That leaves $1,368 billion to run the government. But when we eliminate the $1,169 billion deficit, we would have just $199 billion for all operations of the entire federal government.
Hopefully Miller would support the $137 billion for our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. That would leave exactly $62 billion for Defense (including West Point, Miller's alma mater), Health and Human Services, Transportation (highways, harbors, airports), services for our Veterans, Housing and Urban Development, the departments of State, Education, Homeland Security (securing our borders alone takes almost the entire $62 billion), Energy, Agriculture (food safety, national forests, etc.), Justice (including Miller's federal paycheck), NASA, Commerce (FAA, NOAA etc.), Labor (OSHA, etc.), the Treasury, Interior (BIA, National Parks, etc.) EPA, the National Science Foundation, administering Social Security and Medicare, GSA, "earmarks" and everything else the government does.
This is a 95 percent reduction from existing spending levels for all government programs and services except the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He says he'd do it gradually, but still, this is preposterous. Nobody likes all government programs, but nobody hates them all either.
No sensible Alaskan would vote for this. Alaska has a bigger stake in the federal government, per capita, than any other state. We have tens of thousands of federal jobs, and federal dollars pay many more salaries in state and local government and private contractors. Federal matching programs return six or seven times what we pay in. For decades, Alaska's Congressional delegation has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in extra infrastructure to the state.
We need to cut the federal deficit, but not by arbitrarily eliminating everything from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
• First, stop creating new programs that do not pay for themselves.
• Second, stop bailing out private companies from their own mistakes. (Miller agrees with those two).
• Third, cut or eliminate existing programs that are no longer justifiable by the standards of the 21st Century, not the 18th Century. Use BRAC -- the Base Reduction and Closure process -- as a procedural model. Be ruthless! There are a lot of unjustifiable, ridiculous programs.
• Fourth, reduce each remaining program pro rata -- "starve the beast."
• Fifth, increase federal revenues by opening ANWR and reopening NPR-A and the Chukchi to oil and gas exploration.
• Sixth, give the economy some time to recover.
Finally, we may simply have to live with some deficits. America has a huge appetite for federal services but it does not have the will to pay for all of them.
Kirk Wickersham is an Anchorage attorney and real estate broker. Like Joe Miller, he studied economics at UAF and graduated from Yale Law School. Wickersham supported Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary.
By KIRK WICKERSHAM