They’re demanding, instead, that Speaker McCarthy take us to the brink of default to reduce less than 1 percent of overall spending.
They’re demanding, instead, that Speaker McCarthy take us to the brink of default to reduce less than 1 percent of overall spending.
A s Speaker McCarthy traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue this week to begin negotiations with President Biden on raising the debt limit, it’s important to set realistic expectations for the pending legislative showdown this summer.
During the Obama administration, congressional Republicans sought to use the debt ceiling as a vehicle to enforce spending cuts, but those failed attempts surrendered significant political capital, and deficit spending continued to soar to record heights in the ensuing years.
Similarly, the debt-ceiling standoffs of 2011 and 2013 featured a Republican majority in the House calling for spending cuts and a Democratic majority in the Senate that was unwilling to engage in serious budget reform. Today, as we sink deeper into a debt crisis, the stakes of this battle are larger, but the proposed reforms are significantly smaller.
Unlike a decade ago, roughly 70 percent of our federal budget today props up the growing welfare state in entitlement spending. Rather than address the fundamental drivers of the fiscal crisis we face and seek changes to the bulk of our annual deficit, many of the newly converted fiscal hawks have taken mandatory spending off the table and instead are pushing for a meager 2 percent cut to discretionary spending (which makes up the remaining 30 percent of the total annual budget). The newly converted are demanding that McCarthy take us to the brink of default for a reduction of about 0.6 percent of overall spending. Not only are they asking McCarthy to bear the brunt of the political costs, they are also failing to propose any substantive measure to bend the curve of our spending problem.
To be clear, we need real reform — and we need it now. But it appears that many of the loudest fiscal hawks are more interested in enlisting McCarthy in a losing political fight than restoring fiscal sanity and putting America on a course to solvency.
Annual deficits caused by reckless spending have accumulated a national debt of $32 trillion, a sum so vast that the numbers are truly incomprehensible. A trillion dollars in single-dollar bills laid end to end would extend farther than the distance between the Earth and the sun. We have managed to amass a debt 32 times greater. For the first time since World War II, the national debt is greater than our GDP. But while V-J Day in 1945 offered the hope of renewed economic growth and a drawdown in military spending, no such dramatic turning point in our current fiscal mess awaits us. Instead, we are hoping for officials to pluck up the courage to stop spending, which may not favor their prospects for reelection.
Speaker McCarthy is leading a conference largely elected to curtail inflation that has hammered American families and businesses under the Biden administration. While much of the inflationary pressure was induced by a Federal Reserve that maintained quantitative easing far too long and failed to raise interest rates when warning signs first appeared, the curse of inflation was also unleashed by the out-of-control spending of a Democratic Congress and Democratic president.
To curb inflation and get our fiscal house in order, Republicans are right to demand cuts to federal spending across the board, including traditional GOP priorities such as defense spending. However, many of the party’s marauders now demand cuts to the Pentagon while simultaneously proclaiming that entitlement-spending cuts are off the table. There is simply no way to fix our fiscal crisis without addressing mandatory spending. Essentially, many of the same crusaders who drafted the biggest budget deficits in American history and voted to approve three clean debt-ceiling increases during the Trump administration have now adopted the position of the far left, which has for years demanded spending cuts for the military but not for FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society programs.
I understand that some Republicans are reluctant to address entitlement reform because Democrats’ demagoguery on the issue in the next election cycle would hurt them, but that does not justify misleading the American people by claiming that we can solve the fiscal crisis by taking a scalpel to “wokeism” or the military–industrial complex.
More than ever, America needs elected leaders who will take courageous stands against runaway spending that jeopardizes the fiscal health of our nation and demand commonsense spending reforms in exchange for raising the debt limit. The coalition McCarthy leads, however, includes both real reformers and performance artists unsure of what they are fighting for other than their next booking on cable news.
Republicans have repeatedly lost legislative battles over the debt ceiling to the free-spending Democrats because we have lacked the courage to make hard decisions on the front end of the budget process. Instead, we have focused on the debt-ceiling debate after having allowed, or contributed to, the appropriation of deficit spending.
A renewed debt-limit fight will generate Beltway headlines for the next six months, but without a willingness to even discuss the real drivers of our rising federal deficits, Americans in the heartland will be forced to witness only the spectacle, without the offer of any real solutions to fix the calamity that awaits their children and grandchildren.