When you hear the term “budget cuts,” you might think it refers to the government actually spending less money than it did in the past. But that’s not what Washington means. The Congressional Budget Office publishes a “baseline budget” that projects spending out over the next 10 years based on current spending.
A couple of things fall out of this approach: The extreme overspending of the last few years is already built into the baseline now. It has become the new “normal,” and CBO projections assume that it will only go up from there (by roughly 5 percent or so per year over the next 10 years).
When Congress talks about $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years, that amounts to only $100 billion or so per year. The baseline budget projections already assume growth of $200 billion or more, every year. So what they’re really talking about is a reduction in the rate of growth — they are not talking about the government actually reducing the amount of money it spends. Never, in your lifetime or mine, has the federal government ever failed to increase total spending year-over-year. If we simply froze the budget at the 2011 spending level, and spent the same amount every year for the next five years (2012-2016), the CBO would consider that to be a $2.9 trillion budget cut. No, I’m not kidding.
Congress cannot legally bind a future Congress in its ability to spend. That means that, at any point in the future, the Congress in office can wipe out any “budget cuts” enacted by a previous Congress. That’s why many believe that talking about “budget cuts” that are spread over 10 years is essentially meaningless, and that the only way to ever truly limit the growth of federal spending and the federal deficit is to pass a balanced budget amendment. And, by the way, polls have shown that a clear majority of Americans favor a balanced budget amendment, even if they can’t fully articulate why it’s needed.
Sid Herron
Bothell
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