It’s the ongoing fiscal irresponsibility of Congress, under both parties, that got us into this mess.
Last week, I complained that most of the people who speak and write against using the debt ceiling to constrain future spending are usually quiet about the routine fiscal irresponsibility of Congress and the overspending that got us into this mess. In that post, I included a quote from Jim Tankersley of the New York Times, a journalist who, in my opinion, usually fits that bill.
Today, I want to give credit where credit is due. Yesterday, Tankersley had a long-overdue piece looking at how the country amassed $31 trillion in debt. From the get-go, the author acknowledges that something may not be quite right with our financial situation:
America’s debt is now six times what it was at the start of the 21st century. It is the largest it has been, compared with the size of the U.S. economy, since World War II, and it’s projected to grow an average of about $1.3 trillion a year for the next decade.
He also mentions an important fact — that both sides are responsible for the size of the debt: tax cuts with no spending-cut offsets, spending explosion, expansions of mandatory programs, and bipartisan overspending during emergencies. As Tankersley notes:
It is difficult to fully assign responsibility to individual presidents or parties for total levels of debt, because policy decisions often influence one another. By one crude measure, debt has been a bipartisan pursuit: It grew by $12.7 trillion when Mr. Bush and Mr. Trump, both Republicans, were in office, and by $13 trillion under the Democratic administrations of Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden.
That calculation ignores the reverberations that policy decisions can have even after presidents leave office. Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, for example, are still reducing federal revenue. Charles Blahous, a researcher at George Mason University who studies the federal budget, tried in a recent paper to apportion blame to presidents and parties in Congress for the federal deficit at various times.
For the 2021 deficit, he wrote, Mr. Trump bore the most blame, even though he was out of office. Mr. Biden was the runner-up.
And let’s not forget that President Bush oversaw the expansion of Medicare. Meanwhile, President Trump never pretended he cared about fiscal responsibility, which freed most Republicans from pretending they cared. He also continues to argue that Republicans shouldn’t touch Social Security and Medicare.
That said, the Biden administration and its Democratic Congress win the fiscal-nonsense prize by refusing to scale back pandemic spending — doubling down, even — once the pandemic was over and passing a regressive, unpaid-for, and likely unconstitutional student-loan-forgiveness nightmare. Nasty.
Tankersley also correctly points out that few legislators have taken steps to reduce the deficit they have produced with their legislative action. In recent years, they haven’t even talked.
I am sorry, but it is worth repeating that Republicans systematically fail to talk about fiscal responsibility when they are in the majority but suddenly remember that deficits matter when in the minority. As Chris Chocola, former head of the Club for Growth, once asked, “What good is a majority if you aren’t going to use it? What good is being part of a team, if the team is the problem?” Good question. Moreover, when Republicans stand up for fiscal responsibility, their efforts tend to fail because they are heavy on unrealistic promises (like balancing the budget in ten years without touching defense and entitlements) and gimmicks.
Tankersley also acknowledges that ,while we may not face a debt crisis anytime soon, there is a significant cost to this debt.
Few economists believe the level of debt is an economic crisis at the moment, though some believe the federal government has become so large that it is taking the place of private businesses, hurting growth in the process.
Good for Tankersley for finally writing about debt accumulation and for pointing out its bipartisan nature. Here’s to hoping that the next bipartisan deal in Congress will result in smaller government rather than bigger government.