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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.
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