Posted on 01/21/2011 9:45:30 PM PST by neverdem
The Spending Reduction Act of 2011 appears at first glance to be a meaningful step in the right direction. It’s important not to get too carried away with big numbers, though: $2.5 trillion is a lot of money, but spread out over ten years it averages $250 billion. In FY 2008, the feds spent $3 trillion, so the cuts represent less than 10 percent of total spending before the fiscal debacle over the past two years.
Still, the proposed reductions in future spending are meaningful. Most of the “savings” get us back to the FY 2008 levels, and most of this will come from imposing macro limits on future spending by eliminating automatic increases in appropriations due to inflation, resetting the budget baselines to FY 2008 levels, and reducing the federal payroll by not filling vacancies created by attrition. These aren’t trivial changes. Without establishing FY 2008 as baseline, the effective political baseline will be FY 2010, which would accept and embed the much bigger government established during the recession.
The plan also claims to cut or eliminate 100 other programs. Alas, many of these programs have been on the chopping block since the Reagan administration — Legal Services Corporation, USAID, Amtrak subsidies, Davis-Bacon repeal — and have survived.
Nevertheless, even if this plan does little more than establish a baseline for fiscal restraint leading up to the next presidential election, it will serve a valuable purpose. This is a menu of waste and a set of budgetary benchmarks and milestones that can be used to score Democrats and Republicans.
I worked with Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the Republican Study Committee, when he was in the Ohio Senate, and he was one of the few elected officials willing to spend political capital on political principle. One always worries if the political process inevitably corrupts the best among us. This plan appears to signal that he is serious about creating a better political environment for conservative fiscal principles. Let’s hope he and his colleagues can stay the course and gather momentum for real change.
— Samuel R. Staley is Robert W. Galvin Fellow and Director of Urban & Land Use Policy at the Reason Foundation.
Meaningful but not nearly enough. They should take Paul Rands proposal and build on it.
US$2.5T over a decade is less than a third of what is necessary as a baseline scenario with sustained US economic growth of 3.5% ...
When the Fed finally loses control of the yield curve and interest rates spike up closer to Brasil’s than Switzerland’s, that 3.5% economic growth number is going to look just as much a fantasy as the 8% return projections used by state public sector pension funds actuaries.
Pulling back to 2008 levels is an insult to the economic livelyhoods of private sector workers/citizens in this country.
Remember, President “Cash Money” Bush didn’t use his veto pen for the first 5 YEARS IN OFFICE, every single increase in Federal budgets from the moment he took office until 2006 has to be rolled back also. (Though inflation increases in the 2000 budget items could remain)
And without a military budget reduction in total of all outlays of at least 1/3rd, the US military will be forced into a 1/2 budget reduction in under 10 years due to interest payments on debt service eating everything like a blackhole. That is the official policy position of the Pentagon comptroller’s office for AT LEAST THE LAST 9 YEARS.
“I was shown the figures the other day by the comptroller of the Pentagon that said that the interest on our debt is $571 billion in 2012,” Mullen said at a breakfast hosted by The Hill. “That is, noticeably, about the size of the defense budget. It is not sustainable.”
“We are rapidly approaching the point at which we can no longer fund a robust defense system for the US and the Western world. Our ability to maintain forward strategies to engage and destroy terrorist networks will disappear, but not before we have to scale back our military presence around the world. We have overspent for decades across the board, and the interest payments on the national debt alone will cost us more than our defense systems — on top of which the heavy burden of unfunded entitlement liabilities will start cresting as the Baby Boomers enter retirement. Steve Eggleston updates us on the quickening slide of Social Security into the red, just to remind us of that fact.”
It’s a starting point and should be continued with relish until every unsavory program is gutted.
Thank you for posting.
After looking at hundreds (seriously, maybe thousands) of websites and articles these past few months, the there is one solution, zero deficit budgeting. Our Republican house must refuse to raise the debt ceiling then authorize spending one program at a time until the deficit is zero. First, would be interest payments on the debt. Second, would be operational defense funding. Third would be SS reduced by about 30%. Fourth would be Medicare reduced by 30% and so on.
Only with that hard and clear limit can the implication of each budget choice be made clear.
Spending cuts will never happen; which is why we need to elect politicians who will not enact spending increases.
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