Bogus Hypocrisy Charges Shouldn’t Silence Critics of Overspending

W hen conservatives criticize Democrats for spending too much taxpayer money, we’re typically greeted with an immediate response of whataboutism from the Democrats’ pundit class: If you guys are so fiscally responsible, why didn’t you say more when this or that Republican president cut taxes without cutting spending, or spent money on defense, or signed bloated budget bills? There are several problems with this line of argument.

First, of course, a lot of us have written things critical of various Republican actions or failures to act. Different people have different perspectives, but most of us who criticize too much domestic spending by Democrats have also bemoaned too much domestic spending by Republicans. The timing of those writings are often dictated by events: It is both easier and more urgent to write about proposals that are in danger of passing Congress than about spending-cut ideas that are going nowhere. The biggest battlefield for Republican spending priorities is in party primaries; some of us fought long, losing battles against the nominations of Mitt Romney and Donald Trump — and even George W. Bush — because they were soft on spending.

Second, it is true that conservative critics are often against the Democrats’ choices of what to spend money on. But that does not make complaints about the size of the bill somehow pretextual; it is not inconsistent with also thinking that Democrats are spending too much money. In fact, sometimes, the choice of what to spend money on is very relevant to how much money ends up being spent. Your household budget may well be able to afford $20,000 for a car, but not $20,000 for a wristwatch. Buy the wristwatch, and you still need to find money in your budget for the car.

This is particularly true of two criticisms. Spending on defense is the core purpose of the federal government, and only the most extremely dovish progressives seriously argue for defunding the Army and Navy. Spending on one-time emergency-relief bills such as the bipartisan coronavirus-relief package in March 2020 — which aimed to pay people for damage to their livelihoods owing to government shutdown orders — have the virtue of being temporary and the sort of rainy-day expenditure that you’re supposed to save up for.

Third, many of the charges of hypocrisy assume that tax cuts are exactly the same thing as spending. That is simply not true, and it proceeds from the blinkered Washington view that deficits are the only proper measurement of fiscal responsibility. Deficits only ask what spending costs the government: Is it able to pay for the spending now with taxpayer money, or later with debt that is also paid for with taxpayer money? They don’t address the more fundamental question of how much it costs the taxpayer. A government that spends every penny the taxpayers have is being wildly irresponsible even if it can pay the bills as they arrive. After that, the golden goose is dead.

Spending is a decision to tax. Once you make that decision, the only remaining question is when to collect. Either way, you’re increasing the size of the tax-taking portion of society while decreasing the size of the tax-paying portion of society. That is the ratio that tells you how fiscally responsible your government is.

Let’s spell this out:

• Deficits are bad.
• Debt is worse.
• Both are caused by too much spending, which costs money regardless of when paid for.
• Both are harder to fix when high spending crowds out the private sector from which taxes are extracted.
• All objections to tax cuts are therefore downstream of spending.

Fourth, hypocrisy arguments ignore the matter of scale. Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package cost ten times what the controversial 2004 Iraq War supplemental-authorization cost. The $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan — which is only a little over half of the new spending proposed by Joe Biden this year — is four and a half times Obama’s stimulus. It’s the biggest one-shot peacetime spending bill ever, and nearly the size of the $4.1 trillion cost (in 2011 dollars) of World War II. It’s $27,247.74 for every household in the United States. It’s preposterous to suggest that this is in any way equivalent to previous Republican overspending. This is like hearing that you’re a hypocrite for gaining ten pounds when the person telling you is morbidly obese.

Fifth, quite unlike one-time emergency spending bills or even multiple supplemental appropriations to pay for a war, Democratic spending plans are often intended to be permanent, which means that their actual price tag far exceeds a one-year or ten-year estimate of the cost. That is especially true of new entitlements that require no further authorization from Congress to go on forever, but it is also the aim and design of new spending programs that permanently raise the baseline of the federal budget.

Why does the federal government spend so much money even when Republicans control the White House, Congress, or both? You probably have seen charts on spending, deficits, and debt under Republicans, especially Republican presidents. They are all misleading, and for the same reason: A huge chunk of the budget was passed by unified Democratic governments decades ago. A vast amount of the money spent on Donald Trump’s watch was never authorized by Trump — it was passed by Obama, or Bill Clinton, or Lyndon Johnson, or Franklin Roosevelt. Preventing new, permanent spending is therefore necessarily a higher priority for anyone who actually cares about spending.

Stop it now, or pay for it forever.