By Michael Tanner
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
In what was little more than a footnote amid the noise of
impeachment and the continuing chaos of the Democratic primaries, late last
month the Congressional Budget Office officially announced that for the first
time since 2012, our annual budget deficit will top $1 trillion. Even worse,
our fiscal house is set to remain in abominable shape for the foreseeable
future: The CBO projects that the deficit will average $1.3 trillion from 2021
to 2030 and that the current $22 trillion gross national debt will reach $36.2
trillion by 2030.
None of this concerns the Democratic presidential
candidates, of course. They’re busy promising to spend ungodly amounts of the
taxpayers’ money on any conceivable scheme that they think might win them a few
more votes.
The most shameless of them is the self-proclaimed
democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who has proposed $97.5 trillion in new
spending over the next ten years. To finance his grandiose plans, Sanders is
proposing a variety of taxes on the rich totaling some $23 trillion and more
than $74 trillion in additional debt. Think about that: Sanders’ plan would
push the national debt over $100 trillion by the end of the decade.
Other Democrats are not far behind him, either. Elizabeth
Warren has proposed more than $49 trillion in new spending over the next ten
years. Even more-moderate candidates such as Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete
Buttigieg have called for trillions in new spending. Biden is calling for just
under $6 trillion in new spending over a decade. Buttigieg is calling for $7.5
trillion in new spending over the same period, though in fairness, he has at
least proposed tax hikes sufficient to pay for it, while the others are content
to pass the costs of their plans on to future generations.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that every single
viable Democratic candidate is firmly opposed to reforming Medicare, Medicaid,
and Social Security, the entitlement programs that make up more than half of
federal spending and are the chief engine of our deficits.
As fiscally irresponsible as the Democrats are, though,
anyone concerned about the growing tide of red ink should not look to the Trump
administration for a better way forward. Faced with news of trillion-dollar
deficits, President Trump’s response at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser was a
dismissive, “Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a
country.” And a quick glance at his record confirms that that’s not just more
of his trademark bluster: He has signed $4.7 trillion of new debt into law over
his first three years in office. If he wins reelection and continues at that
pace, by the end of his second term, Trump will end up having added more to the
national debt than President Obama. And he will have done it amid relative
prosperity, rather than the recession Obama had to navigate.
Democrats conveniently blame Trump’s tax cuts for the
ballooning debt. And it is true that the tax cuts have not paid for themselves,
as some supporters claimed they would. Yet, tax revenue is up, albeit less than
predicted under pre-tax baselines. The real culprit lies on the spending side.
The new spending that Trump has signed into law amounts to an additional $1,441
per person per year. As Trump’s defenders are quick to point out, much of the
responsibility for this fiscal recklessness lies with Congress. But the
president, who has proven time and again that he’s more than willing to play
hardball in fighting for the things he really wants, hasn’t made a peep about
the big-spending budgets Congress sends him.
The Trump administration’s most recent budget proposal is
a case in point. It is full of cuts to the usual suspects such as foreign aid
and “lower-tier” entitlement programs — Trump, like his Democratic rivals, has
refused to touch Social Security and Medicare outlays — offset by massive
increases in defense spending. It’s a budget designed to play well with his
base while remaining a non-starter for Congress, and it would make no
difference to our precarious fiscal situation anyway: Even if every one of its
spending cuts made it into law, it would still add around $30 trillion to the
national debt over eight years.
Debt and deficits are not sexy political issues. It will
always be difficult to get voters and the media to pay attention to them. But
in the long run, our bipartisan fiscal irresponsibility is likely to have a
greater impact on our future than the more-entertaining political circus that
captivates us.
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