Tag Archives: government spending

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Reagan Redux? The Federal Budget Battle Shapes Up

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English: A graph of the US GDP compared with F...
A graph of the US GDP compared with Federal budget outlay. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s Donald Trump’s first work week as president of the United States and already, The Hill reports, he “may be headed into a big fight with Republican lawmakers with his plans for dramatic cuts to federal spending.”

Dramatic cuts? Not really: “Team Trump is relying on proposals outlined last year by the Heritage Foundation in its ‘Blueprint for Balance: a federal budget for 2017.’”

The Heritage plan is weak tea. It doesn’t even claim to cut overall government spending, but rather to merely “control the growth” of that spending. And its claim to balance the budget by 2023 is pure sleight of hand. The “primary balance” it mentions excludes interest on existing government debt, which is fast approaching the  half a trillion dollars per year mark.

The  developing Trump plan is the usual tinkering around the edges, searching for “waste, fraud and abuse” in “discretionary spending.” Baby steps like that will never bring the budget into balance, but they’re still too much for Congress.

“Discretionary spending” is politicianese for “spending Congress uses to buy votes back home.”

US Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and US Representative Don Young (R-AK) blew their stacks when they learned that something called the “essential air program” — a federal subsidy for the rural airports so important to their state — might be on the chopping block.

Mississippi Republicans don’t want to lose one of two federal “catfish inspection programs” that hand out artificial government and regulatory compliance jobs to their constituents back home.

A few Republicans will likely peel away from their party to save some discretionary programs usually associated with Democrats: Legal services for the poor, arts funding, and state-subsidized media.

And then of course there’s the single biggest federal budget line: “Defense,” politicianese for “government contracts for expensive planes, ships and weapons systems that keep my campaign contributors happy and let me artificially inflate my district’s employment statistics.”

If you’re not serious about cutting “defense” spending, you’re not serious about cutting spending. The Trump White House and congressional Republicans want to increase, not cut, that budget line.

Some Republicans point out that a balanced budget is impossible without reforming “non-discretionary” spending — Social Security, Medicare and so forth. They’re right. But they’re also making excuses: They won’t cut the spending that it’s easy to cut unless they can also cut the spending that it’s hard to cut, and come hell or high water they’ll find a way to lose the latter fight.

We’ve been here before. Ronald Reagan came into office with plans to balance the budget while cutting taxes and increasing military spending by going after “waste, fraud and abuse,” too. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.

One difference: Reagan could fob some of the blame off on a Democratic House of Representatives. Trump doesn’t enjoy that luxury. The Republican Party owns the House, and the Senate, and the White House — they own the entire federal government. For at least the next two years, that means they also own 100% of the coming fiscal failure.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Score One for Fiorina: A Clarion Call to Budgeting Sanity

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English: A graph of the US GDP compared with F...
A graph of the US GDP compared with Federal budget outlay. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In every presidential election cycle, candidates find themselves called upon to present plans for balancing the federal budget. And, for the most part, their plans call for doing so — in the sweet bye and bye. Never next year, seldom even next decade. The plan is for the current crop of politicians to kick the can down the road some  more, leaving it to future Congresses and administrations to exercise the fiscal restraint that these politicians  won’t.

Not Carly Fiorina. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe (October 7), Fiorina claimed she would submit a balanced budget to Congress in her first term.

Will she? Probably not, if for no other reason than that she wants to increase, not decrease, spending on the single largest sector of the budget, “defense,” so that she can continue the two previous administrations’ program of idiotic military adventurism around the globe.

But, be that as it may, when she explained how she proposed to attack the budget, she put her finger on one of the biggest bad habits of government spenders and promised to fix it. The problem is something called “baseline budgeting.” She proposes to replace it with “zero-based budgeting.” A quick primer:

Under baseline budgeting, the federal government assumes that each department will spend as much as it spent last year, with an automatic upward adjustment reflecting the inflation rate and US population growth. That’s on rails. The only things that have to be justified in the departments’ budget requests are changes upward or downward from that automatic amount — and how often do you think a bureaucrat requests LESS money?

Under zero-based budgeting, it’s assumed that every last dime requested has to be justified from the ground up. Just because the department spent $100 million on chips, dip and  party favors last year, it doesn’t automatically get $102 million for that this year, with the department only having to justify an extra $10 million to buy ponies for all the deputy secretaries (with THAT $10 million forming part of NEXT year’s “baseline”).

The political class, predictably, went ballistic. By the time Fiorina left the set, budget “experts” were loudly reminding us that zero-based budgeting can never work. Why? Well, because the government is just so big and complex that we can’t can’t expect its swarms of bureaucrats to spend time explaining their demands.

The only way to balance the budget, the “experts” say, is to keep automatically forking over more money every year and trust that spending will eventually magically go down on its own. Someday.

Ultimately, balancing a budget is simple: Spend less than you bring in. “Experts” who pretend that zero-based budgeting is out of bounds are the problem, not the solution.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Welcome to Shutdown Theater, 2015 Edition

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The western front of the United States Capitol...
The western front of the United States Capitol. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Well, here we go again. Sample annual headline: “Republicans Threaten Government Shutdown.” This year’s excuse: A feud over whether or not to continue writing an annual $500 million corporate welfare check to Planned Parenthood.

With bated breath, the mainstream media informs us that the usual suspects on Capitol Hill are “working feverishly” to avoid the “shutdown.” If they don’t work out a deal, the media will squeeze a few more days’ or weeks’ worth of purple prose out of this fake calamity.

Yes, fake.

There’s not going to be any “government shutdown.” There’s never been one, nor is one likely in the future. Or at least not until the US government as we know it “shuts down” for good (yes, that will happen someday — nothing lasts forever).

Nor are these fake “shutdowns” anything close to calamities. At worst they’re mild inconveniences, and then only because Americans have acquiesced in government doing far too many things for far too long.

When we hear that the government has, or is about to, “shut down,” there’s always a curious follow-on clause: “Except for essential services.”

You’d be surprised at the variety of seemingly non-essential services the US government considers “essential.” The list is too long for this column, so I’ll just throw out one example: TSA agents will continue to feel up air travelers, even though letting not-quite-qualified wannabe cops routinely sexually assault people has, on the evidence, never prevented so much as a single terror attack.

But here are two more important questions than what’s “essential” or “nor essential”:

First, if something is not “essential” — a synonym for “necessary” or “indispensable” — why is the possibility that the government will stop doing it for a little while always portrayed in the mainstream media, as an impending disaster of epic proportions?

Secondly, if something is not “essential,”  why is the government doing it in the first place? Especially when that government is $18.5 trillion dollars in debt, runs annual spending deficits in the neighborhood of half a trillion dollars each year, and faces future unfunded liabilities which may be in excess of $200 trillion?

It seems to me that the impending fake “shutdown” should be greeted not with angst but with anticipation. Or, at worst, with apathy.

It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even the end of an era. It’s the finale of a bad sitcom’s bad season.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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