USA - Distraction from the debt ($16.7 trillion)

A budget deal looms in the shadow

 of the Syria vote

Congress comes back on Monday, and all eyes will be on the members and whether they will support the president on Syria. The momentous foreign-policy question diverts attention from the equally pressing concern of what to do about the nation’s $16.7 trillion debt.

The federal government’s credit line has been maxed out since March, forcing Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to resort to smoke-and-mirror accounting tricks that make it appear that we’ve stopped the borrowing needed to keep the government running. Mr. Lew says he will run out of gimmicks in mid-October. Congress and the president have only a few weeks’ time to make a plan.

The atmosphere of haste fuels big government. The debt-ceiling deal is the only leverage House Speaker John A. Boehner and his fellow Republicans have over the White House. He could use it to extract approval of the job-creating Keystone XL pipeline, reform ethanol mandates or force a delay of Obamacare implementation before it begins next month.

Rushing a deal means it’s more likely that the debate over Syrian poison gas will be used as an excuse to dispense with $20 billion in the scheduled reduction of defense spending. Those cuts are unfortunate, but it’s hard to take a credible stand in favor of fiscal responsibility without even the wary giving up something.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. There will be noisy drama before a last-minute “compromise” is revealed that only goes one way. President Obama will get to borrow another trillion dollars, and Congress will avoid seriously reducing spending. The status quo will be preserved.

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