Starting in 2010, and then most recently in 2024, I have repeatedly demonstrated that it is very simple to balance the budget.

All that is necessary is some reasonable spending restraint, sort of like what happened during the Tea Party era in the early part of last decade.

Today, based on the newly released 10-year forecast from the Congressional Budget Office, let’s see if it is still possible to balance the budget by limiting the growth of spending.

So I crunched the numbers and the answer is yes. As you can see, it is possible to turn America’s current $1.85 trillion deficit into a balanced budget so long as spending is limited so it only grows 1.1 percent annually over the next 10 years.

If there is a spending freeze, the budget is balanced even quicker (just seven years from now). By contrast, if spending is allowed to grow 2 percent annually (or a bit faster, to mach the projected inflation rate), the budget would not be balanced until the end of next decade.

The moral of the story is that spending restraint is the recipe for fiscal balance. The only issue is whether the goal is to balance the budget quickly or slowly.

Moreover, we have good evidence – both nationally and internationally – that spending restraint actually does reduce red ink.

The same is not true for tax increases. Indeed, the national and international evidence shows that tax increases in the real world lead to more spending and higher levels of debt.

I’ll close by observing that “simple” is not the same as “easy.” In other words, the formula for balancing the budget is very straightforward, but convincing politicians to follow that recipe is seemingly impossible.

For instance, entitlement programs are the reason that “baseline spending” is growing so fast. So the only practical way of balancing the budget is reforming those programs.

Needless to say, that doesn’t seem likely in the near future. Which means America is on a path that will lead to fiscal crisis and massive tax increases.

P.S. When Javier Milei took office in 2023, Argentina had an annual deficit (5.4 percent of GDP) similar to the current deficit in the United States (5.8 percent of GDP). By restraining spending (and with no tax increases), Milei balanced the budget in his first year.