By Michael Tanner
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
‘Oh Lord, give me chastity,” St. Augustine is reputed to
have said. “But don’t give it yet.” So it is with Republicans who have vowed to
show some fiscal discipline — sometime during President Trump’s second term.
But while we are waiting, the Congressional Budget Office
has announced that this year’s budget deficit will top $960 billion, $63
billion more than predicted in May of this year. And next year’s deficit will
almost certainly exceed it. After that, the era of trillion-dollar deficits is
here to stay. By 2029, CBO reports our $22 trillion national debt will top
around $34 trillion.
President Trump may accomplish the truly Herculean feat
of becoming a bigger deficit spender than President Obama. And he’ll do it
without a catastrophic recession to deal with.
How did we get here? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it
wasn’t the Republican tax cut. In fact, when compared to 2018, tax revenues
went up 3 percent in the first nine months of fiscal year 2019. Would they be
even higher in the absence of those cuts? Maybe. But the real problem, as
usual, is out-of-control spending.
The CBO estimates that federal outlays in 2019 will total
$4.4 trillion, a $300 billion increase in nominal spending since 2018.
Discretionary spending is up. Defense spending is up. Entitlement spending is
up. There is no effort to prioritize or make the difficult choices of
governing, there is only . . . more.
While I realize that Congress controls the purse strings,
it is also true that President Trump has shown exactly zero interest in
restraining spending. The only time he speaks out on budget matters is to
demand more money for his latest pet project.
As bad as this is, we can hardly look to the Democrats
for relief. Their spending plans would make Caligula look like Scrooge McDuck.
Consider that with the release of his $16.3 trillion green-energy plan, Bernie
Sanders has now promised more than $58 trillion in additional spending over the
next ten years.
Ok, you say, but Bernie is an avowed socialist, so we
should expect as much. What then about Elizabeth Warren, who “has a plan for
that,” proposing an estimated $40 trillion in new spending over the next
decade. Or Kamala Harris, who would spend an additional $43 trillion over ten
years. And Pete Buttigieg wants to spend an additional $6.9 trillion. Even
supposed moderate Joe Biden has called for around $2.97 trillion in spending so
far.
Worse, the Iowa caucuses are still six months away. The
giant pander-fest that is the Democratic primary is just getting started. The
race is on to see which candidate can be the first to promise more than $100
trillion in spending the government can’t afford.
One wonders how all those young people complaining about
their student debt would react if they understood that their theoretical share
of the national debt was about $67,000.
The growing debt does not come without consequences.
There are, of course, economic repercussions. Over time, debt can slow growth,
reduce wages, and hinder our flexibility in responding to economic slowdowns.
More important, there is a moral dimension as well. Every
child born today inherits a portion of that debt. We are living at our
children’s expense. You can’t get much more “taxation without representation”
than that.
If only someone in Washington cared.
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