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One might think that the recent drama
over the debt ceiling involves one side wanting to increase or maintain
spending with the other side wanting to drastically cut spending, but that is
far from the truth. In spite of the rhetoric being thrown around, the real
debate is over how much government spending will increase.
No plan under serious consideration cuts
spending in the way you and I think about it. Instead, the "cuts"
being discussed are illusory, and are not cuts from current amounts being
spent, but cuts in projected spending increases. This is akin to a family
"saving" $100,000 in expenses by deciding not to buy a Lamborghini,
and instead getting a fully loaded Mercedes, when really their budget
dictates that they need to stick with their perfectly serviceable Honda. But
this is the type of math Washington uses to mask the incriminating truth
about their unrepentant plundering of the American people.
The truth is that frightening rhetoric
about default and full faith and credit of the United States is being
carelessly thrown around to ram through a bigger budget than ever, in spite
of stagnant revenues. If your family's income did not change year over year,
would it be wise financial management to accelerate spending so you would
feel richer? That is what our government is doing, with one side merely
suggesting a different list of purchases than the other.
In reality, bringing our fiscal house
into order is not that complicated or excruciatingly painful at all. If we
simply kept spending at current levels, by their definition of
"cuts" that would save nearly $400 billion in the next few years,
versus the $25 billion the Budget Control Act claims to "cut". It would
only take us 5 years to "cut" $1 trillion, in Washington math, just
by holding the line on spending. That is hardly austere or catastrophic.
A balanced budget is similarly simple
and within reach if Washington had just a tiny amount of fiscal common sense.
Our revenues currently stand at approximately $2.2 trillion a year and are
likely to remain stagnant as the recession continues. Our outlays are $3.7
trillion and projected to grow every year. Yet we only have to go back to
2004 for federal outlays of $2.2 trillion, and the government was far from
small that year. If we simply returned to that year's spending levels, which
would hardly be austere, we would have a balanced budget right now. If we
held the line on spending, and the economy actually did grow as estimated,
the budget would balance on its own by 2015 with no cuts whatsoever.
We pay 35 percent more for our military
today than we did 10 years ago, for the exact same capabilities. The same
could be said for the rest of the government. Why has our budget doubled in
10 years? This country doesn't have double the population, or double the land
area, or double anything that would require the federal government to grow by
such an obscene amount.
In Washington terms, a simple freeze in
spending would be a much bigger "cut" than any plan being
discussed. If politicians simply cannot bear to implement actual cuts to
actual spending, just freezing the budget would give the economy the best
chance to catch its breath, recover and grow.
Ron
Paul
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