Congressman Mark Neumann was talcum-powder dry as he said emergency aid to flood-ravaged Great Plains communities could wait.
He knows there are things victims can do on their own without the government's help.They can hold their noses while whole towns mildew. They can suck on stones to simulate the relief crippled water systems otherwise provide.
This they can do. Neumann said Washington should help, but first things first.
The first thing Congress should do, said the Wisconsin Republican on a C-SPAN call-in show, is find $5.5 billion in spending cuts to offset the $5.5 billion in emergency relief sought by the president.
In addition, Senate Republicans were saying that same day that President Clinton should agree to a plan attached to the aid bill. It would freeze all federal funding automatically at 98 percent of the previous year's levels if spending bills have not been agreed upon by the start of the fiscal year.
Sound travels efficiently to the suffering area and back with their response across North Dakota: "Say what?"
It's a long way from there to the land of the high and dry: Sky blue. Dinner catered. Shoeshine down the hall. In such trappings, one can discuss catastrophe with detachment.
Neumann made this emergency aid sound like just any other debit. It would be irresponsible, he said, to budget this without finding collateral cuts. To do so would be to foist more debt onto future generations. No doubt, he's right in the long run. But this isn't long-run. This is now. Run.
This is where the hull hits the waves when the issue is deficit spending.
A brief history lesson won't help the people of North Dakota, but we must keep reminding ourselves what delivered us here. I'm curious where Rep. Neumann was in the 1980s when his government was accumulating unprecedented debt as it pumped unprecedented amounts of money into a Cold War arms buildup.
Budget hawks like Sen. Phil Gramm say it was worth every penny because we spent the Soviets into submission. Whether or not that was true, the question a real deficit hawk should have been asking was: How are we going to pay for this?
Were we doing the responsible thing, finding revenue to pay for that buildup? No. We did the risk-free thing. We cut tax rates. We ran up our tab.
Maybe we figured there'd be no emergencies down the road.
Neumann's disaster-aid comments on C-SPAN evoked a particular "clank" because a few minutes later, after he said we can't deal with an emergency until we find added spending cuts, he told a phone-caller the government can afford a big-item tax-cut package - a capital gains tax cut, an inheritance tax cut, a $500-per-child tax credit.
Question: Where is the emergency that necessitates tax cuts of such magnitude? Is the economy in a tailspin?
Answer: No. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says things are doing so well that the Treasury may bathe in $225 billion in unforeseen revenues.
With news like that, you'd think aid to flooded American towns would be in the pipeline.
That would leave $199.5 billion to apply to the federal debt that Neumann says we don't want to foist onto future generations.
Don't bet on it. Dating back to the voodoo solutions of another decade, policymakers have shown far more thirst for immediate gains, for instant gratification, than for long-term solutions.
The irony is that true immediate needs, flesh-and-blood needs like disaster aid, get ensnared in phony rhetoric.