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Accountability folly ideological culture national politics & policies responsibility

Politics as Painfully Usual

The crazed nature of our leaders’ willingness to spend beyond revenue, and accumulate debt, is not limited to one party. Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for their outrageously perverse fiscal policies. 

Their irresponsibility hides in plain view, and can be seen in most of the major policy discussions of our time. Take two: 

  1. the Democrats’ idea of putting every American on Medicare and 
  2. the Republicans’ current tax reduction bill.

Though the Republicans often pretend to be all about something called “fiscal conservatism,” their murky tax plan is not fiscally sound. Not yet, anyway — after all, it is “evolving.”

And I expect it to get worse, not better.

“The current plan proposes about $5.8 trillion in tax reduction offset by about $3.6 trillion in base-​broadening offsets, meaning that it would result in a $2.2 trillion deficit increase over the next decade,” Peter Suderman summarizes over at Reason.

They have a number of cuts in the works, but also plan to spend more on defense and the like. The debt would go up.

But if the Republicans are hypocritical and irresponsible, the Democrats add sheer insanity to their irresponsibility. 

“Medicare for All” is pushed by Senator Bernie Sanders, who serves Vermont, where a similar universal system was enacted, only to be repealed after it proved unaffordable even with huge tax increases. All single-​payer/​socialized medicine proposals would require whopping tax increases to work, and the increases in spending would inevitably yield greater deficits.

Besides, Medicare is heading for financial Armageddon. Adding more burdens to a system that they cannot (or simply will not) now make solvent? 

Only a politician could consider such a “solution.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Art by John Goodridge on Flickr

 

Categories
too much government

The Budget Math Deficit

The White House once promised to answer any petition posted at its .gov site that garnered at least 25,000 signatures. (It has since increased the minimum.) Facetious persons urged it to build a Death Star like the planet-​destroyer in Star Wars.

Well, the petition got the necessary signatures, and the Obama administration responded: No, we shan’t build a Death Star. One reason given? Paul Shawcross, a budget official, noted the prohibitive cost.

“We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it,” he says.

Really?

Now consider a widely reprinted lesson in accounting offered a little more than a year ago by Laurie Newsom of the Gainesville Tea Party. Newsom suggested that to better understand the government’s spending antics, drop eight zeros from the budget numbers. Newsom cited annual tax revenue of $2,170,000,000,000, a federal budget of $3,820,000,000,000, new debt of $1,650,000,000,000, national debt of $14,271,000,000,000. And “budget cuts” of $38,500,000,000.

Delete eight zeros and pretend that the national government is just one household. So instead of federal revenue of $2.17 trillion, we have one household bringing in $21,700. But in the same year, its residents are spending $38,200 and adding $16,500 to a credit card with an outstanding balance of $142,710. One the other hand, the family has “cut” $385 from its spending.

Sound like a very disciplined effort to get the fiscal house in order?

Things that can’t continue forever, don’t.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.