Why the Rightwing Jihad for Cutting Spending is a Loser
Read every word of Bruce Bartlett’s explanation.
Bartlett goes into great detail on how “cutting spending” is a pipe dream — either because the kind of stuff that conservatives always tell you they want to get gone won’t do much to balance the budget or because there are not enough votes to get rid of it. He starts with showing how much control the President and Congress respectively have over spending and ends with busting the myths about how Reagan or Thatcher cut spending.
Many of those favoring budget cuts have ridiculous notions about how much of the budget can be cut without reducing services. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans generally believe that 50% of the budget is wasted. This suggests that they believe the federal budget could be cut in half without cutting anything important like Social Security benefits or national defense.
Just so people know the round numbers, total spending this year is about $3.6 trillion. At most, $200 billion of that represents stimulus spending, so even if there had been no stimulus bill and the economy had done as well as it has done, we would be looking at a $3.4 trillion budget.
Revenues are only about $2.1 trillion, so we would be looking at a substantial deficit even if the stimulus package was never enacted. Revenues would be even lower if Republicans had gotten their wish and the stimulus consisted entirely of tax cuts. How tax cuts would help people with no wages because they have no jobs or businesses with no profits to tax was never explained. But many right-wingers are convinced that tax cuts are the only appropriate governmental response no matter what the problem is.
Looking at last year’s budget, only 38% was classified as discretionary; that is, under Congress’s control through the appropriations process. All the rest was mandatory: entitlements and interest on the debt. Within the discretionary category, 54% went to national defense. Just $37.5 billion, 3.3% of the discretionary budget, went for international affairs including foreign aid. Over the years I have encountered many conservatives who thought that abolishing foreign aid was just about the only thing needed to balance the budget. Obviously, that’s nonsense.
Domestic discretionary spending amounted to $485 billion last year. With a deficit last year of $459 billion, we would have had to abolish virtually every single domestic program to have achieved budget balance. That means every penny spent on housing, education, agriculture, highway construction and maintenance, border patrols, air traffic control, the FBI, and every other thing one can think of outside of national defense, Social Security and Medicare.
This means that it is impossible to get control of spending without cutting entitlement programs. Many Republicans agree, but they never make any serious effort to do so. On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.
Seriously, read the whole thing. Bartlett is quite right that the political will does not exist to cut spending on the levels that Republicans or their handlers keep pushing. Not even among their own. Because why would a Republican controlled Congress create structural deficits with every program they implemented — from tax cuts to Medicare Part D to their wars.
I still think that people have the government they want. There are just some people with pet peeves about particular programs. If a politician wanted to cut spending enough to actually balance the books, that politician would be shown the door and his party wiped out for a very long time. Who — really — will cut Medicare? And why not? This is a program with a broad approval across many voting constituencies. And constituencies that vote are not constituencies that pols are going to spend much time pissing off. Unless you are a progressive Democrat. There are folks who milk this cutting spending business because it is a stalking horse for “people I don’t like getting tax money”. But the folks doing the milking don’t do much to propose real spending cuts. Like the repubs who howl about earmarks, but who busily submit their lists and take all they can get. It is way past time to deal with the fact that people have what they want — and work at telling people that they have more of it if they pay for it. Which is not an argument you hear very often.
Tags: Budget
All very true. But tho’ the Recession doth cause us pain it has slain the once mighty Supply Side Economics and the infallibilty of the Tax Cut. No more shall we be Trickled on, none but the most foolhardy will claim these sacred Tax Cuts Pay for themselves with increased revenue. These ideas are discredited and rightly so. Like it or not we must force our beloved Pols here in Dealware and America in general to balance the budget. It can be done, it has been done.It must be done again.
Bruce Bartlett is quickly becoming a must-read columnist, I think. He brings honesty that few conservatives bring. If there’s something I disagree with in his column it’s his contention that since it’s hard to to do it isn’t worth doing. If it’s hard, we just need to work hard to convince people that it needs to get done.
Like it or not we must force our beloved Pols here in Dealware and America in general to balance the budget.
This is exactly right. (Did you really mean to type DEALware? I like it — it sounds exactly like the software that would power the Delaware Way.) Governments should pay for themselves — I see Bartlett as reminding everyone that the only magic involved in doing this is a whole lot more honesty all around. People should not be led to expect gold-plated government without being told the weight of gold being expended for it.
And Bartlett is good. Don’t always agree with him, but it is refreshing to read a smart Republican who is thinking seriously about the issues, not so much about ideology.
Excellent job, Cassandra (and Bartlett), of describing the hypocracy of conservative rhetoric. But there already ARE structural deficits.
In an unfortunate symmetry, pols on the left get elected by promising expanded government programs and protections, while pols on the right get elected by promising to cut or hold taxes. But few people who want to get elected to public office in the US actually admit a connection between what we spend and what we get. The American people are crazy about moral ideologies, but allergic to actual math.
I hate to always be so sour. But we are entitled and lazy.
The American people are crazy about moral ideologies, but allergic to actual math.
Well said!
This all reminds me of those heady days last year when future President McCain was going to solve all our problems by cutting pork barrel spending. And once he realized it was a miniscule portion of the budget, I suppose he would have just added a few magic words (Abraca-Trickledown!) and maybe a creepy smile, then all would have been right.
All snark aside (and that’s quite a concession for me), it’s understandable that the bulk of the public can’t and doesn’t understand how governmental budgeting works. That’s fine. That’s why we have a republic and not a democracy. But for actual lawmakers to be ignorant or blind to how it works is just scary. Tax cuts cost money. G.H.W. was right, to think otherwise is voodoo. People need to be made aware that if tax revenue is lowered, either the defecit will rise or spending will be cut. And there’s not enough out there to just cut “Stuff I don’t like or that doesn’t help me”. Eventually you have to cut stuff you do like.
PS — Oh, yeah. And the Pentagon is funded with real money, too.
The American people don’t understand the budget because politicians and the media can’t or won’t explain it to them.
The American people don’t understand the budget because politicians and the media can’t or won’t explain it to them.
That’s right, and it covers several problems. Many politicians don’t understand it, but yet still talk about. Then they get quoted by writers who don’t understand, but assume the pols do. Or the politicians do understand, yet willfully mislead. All along, the people who really do understand are sorely underrepresented. During the stimulus debate (a very complicated, counter-intuitive situation), how many economists did you see on the talk shows, as compared to he said/she said politicians?
There’s little political capital to be had in understanding how the budget works. Unless you are trying to get your earmarks or slide in a program for your contributors.
It is so much easier to play to the innumerate and pretend that the government is too profligate — but part of this passion play is that the politician speaking is somehow not empowered to stop the spending.
There is a great book I reviewed here some time ago called: Where Does the Money Go?: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis which really does put it all in context in a politically neutral way. It’s biggest strength is helping people to wrap their minds around the enormity of the numbers involved AND in the very real difficulty in cutting spending. Highly recommended.
In the course of the day, which politician will get on the nightly news and in most local newspapers:
A) The One Who explains the current fiscal situation cogently and with nuance, outlining the issue and his solution;
or
B) The One Who says “My opponent is a tax and spend Kennedy liberal who couldn’t balance a plate, much less a budget?”
I don’t think that the reporters, print or broadcast, assume the pols know what they’re talking about. They don’t care and they don’t check (in general). They care about getting the snappiest bit of text. The policy wonks get mocked (think about Clinton, Gore, Rice, etc.) mostly because they aren’t glib and don’t have quick answers to complicated issues.
And the math IS complicated. If it was as easy as, say, the death penalty, “for” and “against” would do.
Progressive Mom makes a great point here too — few in the media get the numbers OR how the numbers work, either. Plus, you can get on the TV or the radio and make pretty much any claim about the numbers and no one will fact check that.
But here is a great report from NPR last week or so about the impossibility of merging two financial regulatory agencies. A merger that lots of people think makes sense — a merger that Republican Mike Oxley tried to make happen and Barney Frank would like to make happen, but knows he would be beating his head against the wall for.
No one is voting for a real constituency for cutting spending or reducing government.
It is clear that balancing the budget by just blatant cutting and slashing will not work.
54% of the budget being in defense is ridiculous, even in wartime. It is unsustainable.
What is NOT included in the 54% is the VA health care system, which is an entitlement. So the cost of waging wars is even tweaked to look better.
This country needs to drastically redefine it’s military priorities or it will bankrupt our country.