Official Washington’s rapid response to the General Services Administration’s billionaire-bachelor-party level of profligacy is welcome, as it goes. However, GSA’s much-maligned, $822,751 team-building extravaganza in Sin City is like a whispered prayer compared to daily life in Washington. Alas, when it comes to partying ’til the money runs out, what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas.
After sacking two subordinates, GSA administrator Martha Johnson appropriately resigned as news emerged about her agency’s now notorious 2010 Las Vegas junket. At least five other GSA employees have resigned or been suspended or fired. Its taxpayer-funded decadence included $6,325 for commemorative coins, a $7,000 sushi bar, a $31,208 “networking reception,” a $75,000 bicycle-building exercise, and six location-scouting trips that cost $130,000. Before receiving “yearbooks” as parting gifts (price: $8,130), participants marveled at the taxpayer-funded services of a psychic and a clown.
“We have taken bold, swift, forceful action to hold those responsible accountable and put in place protections to make sure this never happens again,” a White House official told Fox News Channel’s Ed Henry last week, just before — what else? — blaming the mess on rising event costs under Obama’s predecessor. “If Bush administration folks had acted under their watch, the 2010 debacle could have been avoided.”
Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) and Senator Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) plan hearings on this imbroglio, underscoring it as a source of bipartisan, bicameral disgust.
GSA deserves all of this incoming fire, especially after a rap video emerged in which its employee, Hank Terlaje, bragged about the agency splurging tax dollars “all on fun.” As Terlaje “sang”: “Donate my vacation / love to the nation / I’ll never be under OIG investigation.”
As it happens, GSA’s Office of Inspector General did look into this. In fact, an OIG investigation uncovered Terlaje’s video. His performance reportedly helped Terlaje win the Vegas blowout’s talent show. For that distinction, GSA Deputy Commissioner David Foley appointed Terlaje “commissioner for a day.”
Though understandable, fretting about this fiasco is a bit like obsessing over the lack of ice in an in-flight beverage while one’s trans-Atlantic jet plunges toward a “water landing.” Yes, bourbon would be better on the rocks, but more profound discomforts loom.
Similarly, it would be lovely if simply restricting GSA staffers to their desks would make even a cocktail napkin’s worth of difference on Uncle Sam’s dismal finances.
Not bloody likely.
On good days, the pace of federal spending rivals the speed of Air Force One. On bad days, it could break the sound barrier.
As Stephen Dinan observed in Friday’s Washington Times, March 2012 was the 40th consecutive month of federal deficits. Last month alone, Washington spent $196 billion more than it collected.
“The government never has run a surplus in any month during President Obama’s tenure,” Dinan wrote. “The longest previous deficit streak on record was 11 months.”
Washington has racked up deficits of $777 billion for the first six months of this fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office reports. When FY 2012 concludes next September 30, the federal government will have hatched another $1.2 trillion budget deficit. That sum alone would enable the GSA to reprise that Las Vegas bash 1,458,520 times.
Of course, this is not Uncle Sam’s first trillion-dollar deficit. This will be the fourth straight year in which at least $1 trillion in red ink has cascaded from the capital.
These annual deficits collectively constitute the national debt. That sum has soared past the $15.6 trillion mark and is climbing toward today’s national debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion. Uncle Sam’s top hat will slam into that barrier by October 15, just in time to create a huge campaign issue this fall.
The Treasury pays interest to those who are generous, loyal, or gullible enough to keep lending Washington money. According to the CBO, these debt-service payments will clock in at $224 billion this year alone and, through 2022, will total $4.47 trillion. That figure is roomy enough to contain two Obamacares, with space to spare.
Remember that the Federal Reserve last year bought 61 percent of the bonds that the Treasury issued. In essence, Uncle Sam pulled five $20 bills from his left pocket, put three of them in his right pocket, and then boasted that he had $160 to spend.
For its part, the Treasury will pay interest to the Federal Reserve as a return on the money that it borrowed from the Fed; the Treasury also eventually will pay back the Fed its principal, as soon as it stops spending what it borrowed in the first place. And the Treasury, sooner or later, will get this money from . . .
Overseas? Probably not. Chinese, Japanese, and other foreign investors have curbed their new purchases of U.S. sovereign debt by 68.3 percent, as former Treasury official Lawrence Goodman explained in the March 27 Wall Street Journal, from an amount equal to 6 percent of America’s GDP in 2009 to just 1.9 percent of GDP in 2011. Seeing Standard & Poor’s slash the credit rating of Earth’s sole remaining superpower surely did not boost foreign financiers’ confidence, nor was it helpful when the bipartisan congressional supercommittee crashed and burned last fall without shaving one dime of federal spending. (Another rating agency, Egan Jones, downgraded U.S. debt to AA last week, down from AA+. That, in turn, followed last year’s downgrade from the top AAA rating that America has enjoyed for decades.)
These enormous figures, of course, say nothing about the staggering unfunded liabilities that the federal government will have to pay — at some point. Politicians have made (and continue to make) promises that look impossible for the Treasury to keep. As USA Today calculated last June 7, these include $2 trillion for pension and health benefits for civilian federal employees, $3.6 trillion for military retirement and disability payments, $21.4 trillion for Social Security, and $24.8 trillion for Medicare, including the prescription-drug benefit enacted in 2003. (Thank you, G. W. Bush! Thank you, Karl Rove!)
Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), the Senate Budget Committee’s top Republican, recently concluded that Obamacare significantly will swell the national debt, despite Obama’s lies to the contrary. In fact, Sessions estimates that Obamacare will create a brand-new unfunded liability of $17 trillion!
Combine these Great Lakes of red ink, and America faces $68.8 trillion in obligations that it lacks the money to satisfy.
These numbers approach the outer limits of human comprehension. So, Engage America (with which I am a thought leader) suggests this method for making these figures understandable to normal human beings:
Chop eight zeros from these numbers and assume that you are managing a household budget.
Your annual household income equals America’s $13,500,000,000,000 gross domestic product, minus eight zeroes. This equals $135,000. Imagine that your household just last month, for the 40th month in a row, spent more than you earned — in March, specifically, $1,960 more. By the end of this year, you plan to shell out $12,000 more than you make. This would be atop a household debt of $156,000, which will rise to $164,000 by October. Members of your household also have pledged, long term, to spend $688,000 more than you foresee having in your bank account.
Your household soon would be jetting non-stop to bankruptcy court. And yet, our masters in Washington just keep spending, as if they had been vaccinated against the consequences of their actions.
So, by all means, the firings at GSA should continue, until everyone behind the Las Vegas debacle has crapped out. The entire agency should be kept on a six-inch-long leash.
However, Americans should refocus their rage on the far more scandalous taxing, borrowing, and spending machine called Washington, D.C., which is destroying our beautiful country — right before our eyes.
— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, a Fox News contributor, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been amended since its original posting.