Blog: Congress Fiddles 1200 Days Without a Plan for What We Spend

Statement

In late July 2010, with the Democratic Party firmly in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, the White House availed itself of the cynical and rather sophomoric tactic of releasing important but unflattering information on a Friday afternoon so that fewer people would notice it. What was the bad news? That budget deficits for Fiscal Years 2010 and 2011 were likely to be even higher than the $1.4 trillion we had to borrow to keep the lights on in Fiscal 2009.

For readers who aren't very good at math, $1.4 trillion is more properly written $1,400,000,000,000. It has 11 zeros. If you had that many dollar bills in a stack, it would reach almost halfway to the moon. If instead you made a carpet out of them, it would be about three times the size of Delaware.

That day--July 23, 2010--has not been marked by historians, as far as I am aware, but I think it was quite significant. What mattered most, however, was not what happened that day; it was what happened next: Nothing.

I would like to tell you that Americans rose up in indignation, fired everyone in the House of Representatives (the body that appropriates money, you recall), and started over with a fresh group of representatives who understood the severity of our fiscal problems. I would like to tell you that in October 2010, when two little-known Libertarian candidates for the House unveiled a budget that actually achieved balance in just one year, and produced surpluses for all later years, a groundswell of support swept dozens of Libertarians into Congress. I would like to tell you that the Libertarians' stiff-spined leadership interrupted "business as usual" on Capitol Hill and put the country back on the road to a more peaceful and more prosperous tomorrow.

Unfortunately, that's not what happened.

Voters did deal a stinging rebuke to the Democratic Party, but the beneficiaries were the Republicans, who had received their own stinging rebukes in the two preceding elections. Some pundits expressed confidence that the Republicans had "learned their lesson" and that they would stick to their principles this time instead of falling back into their free-spending ways.

Unfortunately, that's not what happened either.

Instead, we know that Republicans came to town, talked tough, and approved spending increases together with tax cuts. A special bipartisan commission made some decent recommendations, but these were ignored immediately by both sides. The President's 2012 budget proposal failed to bring the budget into balance at any point in the next ten years. The Republicans' counterproposal, though less expensive than the President's, also permitted spending to rise and also failed to bring the budget into balance at any point in the next ten years. When our burgeoning national debt bumped up against the very generous limits our foreign creditors keep authorizing, Republicans and Democrats joined hands and cast the hard votes necessary to . . . create another bipartisan committee.

Today, August 7th, is the 1,196th day since the last time Congress passed a concurrent budget resolution. That's more than three years without a blueprint for federal spending, and that's not even the worst part. In fact, all the insiders say quite openly that Congress has just given up on budgeting for the rest of this year, but even that is not the worst part. The worst part is that neither Republicans nor Democrats are even proposing budgets that would actually put our fiscal house in order. President Obama has made no significant effort to rein in federal spending, and he appears to regard deficits in the neighborhood of $1.3 trillion (that's $1,300,000,000,000) as "the new normal." Republican budgetmeister Paul Ryan has countered with a budget that costs about $5 trillion less over the next ten years, but which would not manage to balance our budget until approximately 2040.

It's hard to write anything about this because it's hard to believe it's necessary. Isn't it obvious that we simply can't continue this way? Wasn't it already obvious when the deficits were less than half as large as they are now? All that has happened in the interim is that the change we so obviously need has become harder, and we have less time to effect it.

But since the point has so far been lost on my own senators and congressman, and on most others, let me offer four brief observations on budget policy and budget politics.

First, note how large these deficits are in percentage terms. It's not just that we're borrowing over $1,300,000,000,000 per year; it's that we're borrowing more than 40 cents out of every dollar we spend. For every three dollars the federal government takes in, Congress has spent not just an extra nickel or even an extra quarter, but an extra two bucks. In other words, they're not even close, and they haven't been for years!

Why does this matter? Partly because it tells us that no one's really trying very hard to balance the budget; it is as if no one really remembers that ideally the expenditures should be lower than the revenues. No one in Congress seems to remember what zero means anymore. (It means, "Stop spending.") Obviously, the correct response to this on our part is to fire Congress.

But perhaps more importantly, it also tells us that it's ludicrous for people to approach our budget problems by talking about how to save money here and there on existing programs. The only way to limit the size and cost of government is to limit the number of things we ask government to do. The only way to cut our government back down to a size we can live with is to eliminate all the extraneous programs that our founders never intended for a national government to do in the first place. The road to fiscal responsibility in 2013 and beyond runs right through Article I of our Constitution.

My second brief observation is that it's no mere coincidence that these gargantuan deficits became routine during a period in which Congress suddenly decided that the job of passing a budget each year was optional. If your budget were this out of whack--and if you or your spouse is out of work, it may be--then surely the first thing you would do is sit down and make a plan. Somehow expenditures need to be brought into balance with revenues, and there's no budget fairy that will do that for us while we're sleeping (or passing expensive entitlements, or even trashing the first amendment by passing new regulations of campaign speech). Saving money--big money--did I mention that we're talking about $1,300,000,000,000 per year?--takes thought; it takes effort. Without a blueprint for saving money, is it any wonder that no money was saved?

Remember this in November: In the face of a looming fiscal disaster capable of shaking the very foundations of our national government, our current representatives--Republicans and Democrats alike--have done nothing. They didn't even take a shot at it. Again, obviously, the correct response to this on our part is to fire Congress.

Third, there is a lot of talk in Washington about "reducing the deficit," or putting the budget on a "glide path" that supposedly will result in a balanced budget sometime in the distant future. President Obama's former budget chief once bragged that he was on track to cut the budget deficit in half before the end of President Obama's first term. As the President would say, "Let me be clear": Cutting the deficit in half is an idiotic goal. The budget should be balanced as quickly as possible. We have got to stop thinking of budget deficits as if they have no more long-term significance than last night's baseball score. Every year in which any deficit exists raises the national debt, and it's the national debt that determines how much of next year's budget gets soaked up in interest payments we can't do anything about. Even in the unlikely event that deficit spending in 2013 can be held as low as the $900,000,000,000 the President projects, that will be really, really bad. This is not a good-news-bad-news story. There is no silver lining.

Finally, the persistent use--by Democrats and Republicans--of gimmicks like ten-year budget forecasts and bipartisan commissions is nothing short of contemptible. The ten-year budget plans are a fraud on the public, because no one lives in years two through ten; we live in year one, always year one, year after year. And as for bipartisan committees, we already have one that's supposed to balance the budget every year. It's called Congress, and we pay an awful lot to keep it in session. If the people we've been sending to Congress for years and years, Democrats and Republicans alike, are collectively too timid, too lazy, or too incompetent to even try to tackle the single biggest problem we face as a nation, then it's high time for us to send different people to Congress.

People sometimes debate hypothetical questions about how far we would go to make a terrorist tell us the location of a ticking time bomb. But for Pete's sake, there's a debt bomb ticking loudly right inside the Capitol at this very moment, and no one in the Congressional leadership seems to care! How much time do they think we have?

This is not complicated. We need to spend less. Much less. Starting right now.

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