My major long-run project during Obama’s presidency was to educate Republicans in Washington about the need for genuine entitlement reform. I explained to them that the United States was doomed, largely because of demographics, to suffer a Greek-style fiscal future if we left policy on autopilot.
Needless to say, I didn’t expect any positive reforms while Obama was in the White House.
Instead, I proselytized for fiscal sanity in hopes that the GOP might be willing to fix our fiscal mess if they had total control of the White House and Congress after the 2016 election.
And it seemed like things were moving in the right direction.
After they took power in 2010, House Republicans repeatedly voted for budget resolutions that included meaningful changes to Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare, as well as reductions in wasteful pork-barrel spending. And after the 2014 GOP landslide, Senate Republicans also voted for a budget resolution that assumed good reform.
Then we got the unexpected Trump victory in 2016 and Republicans held all the levers of power starting in 2017.
Sounds like good news for advocates of spending restraint, right?
That may be true in some alternative universe, but that’s definitely not the case in Washington.
As I warned before the election, President Trump is a big-government Republican. And a majority of congressional GOPers, after years of chest beating about the importance of spending restraint, suddenly have decided that the swamp is really a hot tub.
In 2017, my main gripe was that Republicans committed a sin of omission. 
They had power and didn’t adopt good reforms.
In 2018, they shifted to a sin of commission, voting to bust the spending caps as part of an orgy of new spending.
And guess what they want to do for an encore?
In the ultimate add-insult-to-injury gesture, Republicans (at least the ones in the House) are hoping voters will overlook their profligacy because they’re going to have a symbolic vote on a poorly drafted version of a balanced budget amendment.
The House is slated to vote next week on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution… The decision to bring the measure — which would require Congress not to spend more
than it brings in — to the floor comes just weeks after the passage of a $1.3 trillion spending package that is projected to add billions to the deficit. …The measure has virtually no chance of becoming law as it would need Democratic support in the Senate and ratification from the majority of states.
This is insulting.
These clowns vote to expand the burden of spending and now they want to hoodwink voters with a sham vote for something that has no chance of happening (an amendment requires two-thirds support from both the House and Senate, and then would require ratification from three-fourths of state legislatures).
Do they really think we’re that stupid?!?
To make matters worse, they’re not even proposing a good version of an amendment. Here’s the core provision of H.J. Res 2.
Section 1. Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year, unless three-fifths of the whole number of each House of Congress shall provide by law for a specific excess of outlays over receipts by a rollcall vote.
Sound reasonable and innocuous, but I’ve been telling folks on Capitol Hill this is the wrong approach. I pointed out that 49 out of 50 states have some form of balanced budget requirement, yet that doesn’t stop states such as Illinois, California, and New Jersey from over-taxing and over-spending, or from accumulating more debt.
I also explained that the so-called Maastricht rules in the European Union operate in a similar fashion, yet that hasn’t stopped nations such as Greece, France, and Italy from over-taxing and over-spending, or from accumulating more debt.
The problem, I explained, is that anti-deficit rules simply give politicians an excuse to raise taxes (which leads to more spending and more red ink, but I don’t think that causes many sleepless nights for elected officials).
If Republicans are going to go through the trouble of having a phony and symbolic vote, they should at least craft a good amendment. In other words, they should rally behind some sort of spending cap modeled after what exists in Switzerland and Hong Kong. They could even use Representative Kevin Brady’s widely praised MAP Act as a template.
A spending cap is far superior to a balanced-budget rule for two reasons.
- A spending cap puts the focus on the real problem of excessive growth of government. And if you impose some sort of cap that complies
with the Golden Rule, you simultaneously address the real problem of too much spending and the symptom of red ink. - A spending cap is much easier to enforce since politicians know that spending can only increase each year by, say 2 percent. A balanced-budget rule, by contrast, is inherently unstable and unworkable because annual revenues can jump or fall significantly depending on economic conditions.
And it’s not just me saying this. Even left-leaning international bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund (twice), the European Central Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (twice) have acknowledged that spending caps are the only effective fiscal rule.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Republican politicians are behaving in a despicable fashion.
So you can understand my caustic and frustrated responses in this recent interview with Charles Payne. I’m upset because it’s quite likely that Trump’s spending splurge eventually is going to lead to higher taxes.
I pointed out in the interview that Trump was in a position of power. He could have won the budget fight if he was willing to play hardball with a shutdown.
And I also explained that there shouldn’t be a Washington infrastructure plan for the simple reason that we shouldn’t have a federal Department of Transportation.
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Image credit: Trump White House Archived | Public Domain.
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