For decades (literally), I’ve maintained that make-believe budget cuts are the biggest form of budgetary dishonesty in Washington. But this John Stossel video discusses another scam politicians use to squander more money.
So-called emergency spending is not a trivial problem.
Here’s a chart from Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett, which documents $12 trillion of supposed emergency spending over the past three decades.
At the risk of understatement, that huge amount of money is a big reason Washington is a fiscal disaster.
Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center wrote about the emergency scam in a column for the New York Sun. Here are some excerpts.
Remember…the debt-ceiling deal… Well, it took less than two months for politicians to start evading the caps with an old trick: emergency spending. …politicians shamelessly abuse the emergency label to push through non-emergency spending that would otherwise violate budget constraints. …If legislators believe more is needed, they should debate and allocate that money through the regular budget process. …putting the “emergency” label on anything important — or not-so important — but not unforeseen makes a mockery of budget rules and the debt-ceiling caps and, indeed, of the very concept of emergency spending. …There is always an excuse. …It’s time to fix the current process and stop an abuse that only further weakens the government’s fiscal condition. The best option would be to stop exempting emergency spending from budget rules. That would mean that supplemental spending, emergency or otherwise, must be offset with spending cuts on other programs.
Let’s look at a very recent example of the emergency-spending scam.
Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal opined two months ago about Biden playing this fraudulent game.
Congress is trickling back from summer recess, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer intends to move swiftly to pass a giant “supplemental aid” package that funds Ukraine assistance, disaster relief and border security (for starters). The goal is to jam House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, forcing him to forgo whatever spending restraint was negotiated in the June debt-ceiling agreement… The White House bait—or cudgel—is “crisis” disaster-relief funding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency warned in April that its disaster fund could be out of money by July. Yet somehow the administration didn’t make a priority of this “critical” FEMA funding during the May debt ceiling talks, unwilling as it was then to cede any of its other domestic pork, such as green subsidies and its $80 billion IRS blowout. Only after next year’s spending levels were set did it cry poverty, asking for an “emergency” $16 billion for FEMA.
The bottom line is that the misuse of emergency spending is a serious problem. Politicians routinely slap an emergency label on things that are not emergencies. And, when there is an actual emergency, they use that as an excuse to include lots of non-emergency spending (as we saw during the Trump–Biden COVID spending spree).
But is there a solution? There are sometimes real emergencies, so banning supplemental spending bills presumably is not the answer.
The best answer is to adopt an American version of Switzerland’s spending cap.
Having a spending cap is good overall fiscal policy, of course, but a very relevant feature of the Swiss spending cap is that there is a provision for emergency spending, but any extra spending has to be offset by additional spending restraint in the future.
Which helps to explain why American politicians were nearly four times as profligate as Swiss politicians during the pandemic.
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Image credit: Bjoertvedt | CC BY-SA 3.
