Arnold Kling makes a very good point:
Message to Republicans: if you cut spending on “worthy causes” to zero, you still would not balance the budget. You will have to raise personal income taxes.
Message to Democrats: if you increased personal income tax receipts by 25 percent (a ginormous tax increase), you still would not balance the budget. You will have to cut back on “worthy causes.”
“Worthy causes” as defined by Dr. Kling are “Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, NSF” or practically all of the regulatory apparatus of the federal government. The real discretionary spending is a subset of the total cited by Dr. Kling and, needless to say, we aren’t going to balance the budget just by cutting it. Note also: there is no line item in the budget for waste, fraud, and abuse. Reducing it will be done by a combination of prudent tenacity and good fortune. I see no reason to believe that we’ll realize a big net savings by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.
IMO responsibility resides in negotiating compromises rather than looking for magic solutions. We’re going to need to do a little of this and a little of that to achieve fiscal sanity—raise taxes some, cut spending some, reduce entitlements some.
Both of our political parties have painted themselves into corners on this subject. The Republican are absolutely batshit looney on the subject of taxes. And Democrats very clearly have no understanding of what went on during the Clinton Administration. The budget mostly got balanced over the objections of the Democratic Congressional leadership not because of it. Having extra revenue on hand due to the fortunate confluence of the Y2K technology spending spree and ten years of capital investment in technology finally paying off helped, too. The Internet bubble, the slowly and painstakingly cultivated fruit of a relatively small government investment, didn’t hurt, either.
If good fortune were the norm, it wouldn’t be good fortune anymore. It would just be the way things are. It wasn’t the way things are. It was good fortune. We need to start making some hard choices immediately and our leaders must, much to their dismay, start leading.
