We’re Not Going to Fix Our Spending Crisis

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, July 26, 2021

 

Here’s a funereal thought to darken your Monday: The United States is not going to address its spending crisis. The Democrats aren’t going to address it. The Republicans aren’t going to address it. The voters aren’t going to address it. It will just roll on like the Mississippi, undeterred, untiring, and unstoppable. It is now a part of our firmament — assumed as the political starting point by every man and his dog.

 

We are told from time to time that we will eventually hit a crisis that will serve to wake us up. But, if anything, the opposite is likely true, for instead of prompting sobriety and retrenchment, the crises of recent years have served only to make things worse. The 2008 crash prompted a mitigation effort that not only cost trillions of dollars on its own terms, but led in turn to the creation of a host of new spending programs that have now been absorbed into the baseline. The same is true of the federal government’s COVID-19 relief efforts, which cost $5 trillion in and of themselves and are now being used as justification for a “rebuilding” agenda that will add another $4 trillion on top of that. One might have expected that, assessing the scene in January of 2021, the Democratic Party would have said, “Well, I guess all the money is gone.” But it didn’t.

 

And why would it, given that we are now so far down the hole that the public has come to see astronomical numbers as mere abstractions? Even ten years ago, a trillion dollars was regarded as an enormous amount of money — enough, perhaps, to disqualify any spending proposal at the first hurdle. Now? Nobody seems to care. $2 trillion? $4 trillion? $10 trillion? None of it is deemed real anyway, so what does it matter? Balance sheets, interest rates, opportunity costs — whatever. Tell me, instead: What’s the right thing to do?

 

Were an alien to listen to our political rhetoric, he would be forgiven for concluding that the United States had solved its fiscal issues somewhere around 2015. A decade ago, even Barack Obama acknowledged that America had a problem. Now, his party sees no issue with the debt hitting $30 trillion — and, in some influential quarters, it hopes actually to expand what we spend on entitlements. To make matters worse, the Republican Party has noticed recently that fiscal conservatism puts off a good number of potential voters, and it has concluded in consequence that it ought to shut up about spending on the things that truly matter to them. Somehow, in the space of just a decade, we have gone from Simpson-Bowles to silence.

 

Or, worse: To contempt. In our current political environment, those who worry about the debt are routinely treated as if they are unforgivably out of the step with the zeitgeist. During the 2016 election, the American media routinely wrote stories praising Donald Trump for having “realized” that talking about deficits, the debt, and our looming entitlements disaster was a buzzkill, and having moved the Republican Party away from such talk as a result — as if such problems only exist if politicians are willing to discuss them. This was perhaps inevitable from the press, which considers breaking the bank to be “governing” and casts any attempt to do anything about deficits as an unconscionable “austerity,” and yet its argument has been seamlessly absorbed by members of the “New Right,” who see Trump’s approach as the correct one and who regard any attempt to address our debts as an irritating distraction.

 

Meanwhile, the debt, which is indifferent to such concerns, continues to mount apace.

 

At present, the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., is that the Democrats are primarily constrained by what they believe they can get away with ahead of the midterms. In a political sense, this is, of course, true: The bar is high, but if the Democrats push their agenda too far, enough moderates may indeed vote Republican to flip control of Congress. In a fiscal sense, however, such considerations are irrelevant. The public backlash against the Democrats’ spending could be absolutely enormous, and it still wouldn’t make any difference in the long run. Come 2023, if the Republicans retake the majority, they’ll do . . . well, precisely nothing. Sure, they might slow the rate of growth for a while; but they won’t cancel any of the existing spending, they won’t repeal any of the programs that are driving it, and they certainly won’t touch entitlements.

 

And here’s the thing: Nobody, beyond a few worrywarts, will ask them to. As we have now learned over and over, the voting public is far more interested in punishing parties for their profligacy post hoc than it is in demanding that that profligacy be legislatively undone — which means that, irrespective of the political undulations it causes, whatever spending is in place on November 9, 2022, will be in place 20 years later, too. There’s no end to this, I’m afraid — or at least, no end that will be brought about by choice.