As if there were any doubt, the notion of fiscal responsibility in Washington, D.C., is a fallacy. Leaders from both parties continue to mortgage the nation’s future in an irresponsible and unsustainable fashion, choosing expediency over restraint and pandering over policy.
In the process, they have increased the bill that we are handing to our children and their children, driving up the federal debt despite a robust economy. The national debt is now more than $22 trillion, and the deficit for this year is expected to be $1 trillion. With last week’s agreement to raise the debt ceiling and add $320 billion in spending, the United States continues to dig a hole that threatens to bury the nation’s prosperity.
In 2011, Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler said: “If Congress doesn’t stop the overspending, America will cease to be the ‘land of opportunity’ we all know. … Our current national debt is crippling businesses, hurting families and stifling the growth of new jobs.” That was when a Democrat was in the White House, meaning that Republicans pretended to care about the deficit. Now, with a free-spending Republican president, they have abandoned all pretense of fiscal responsibility.
They are not alone. With Democrats now controlling the House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., is reveling in a bipartisan spending party with plans to send the public the invoice at some yet-to-be-determined time.
Undoubtedly, getting the public to care about the deficit is a daunting task. As long as the economy appears to be strong and unemployment is low, Americans give little thought to the future. As conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said on the air last week: “Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore. All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around.” The last time the federal government ran a surplus was between 1998 and 2001; the last time before that was 1969.
It was this lack of concern that led Republicans to pass tax cuts and boost spending in 2017. It is this lack of concern that led Democratic congressional leaders to reach a spending agreement with the White House last week. Republicans desire increases in defense spending; Democrats want more spending on health programs, education, science and housing. Nobody wants to go home and explain why they held the line on the budget, so they spend money they do not have.
Among the problems with this is the interest being paid on the debt. As CNN explains: “In the first quarter of 2019, the United States’ debt load was nearly $70 trillion. To borrow that much debt, the country needs to pay an enormous amount of interest to its bondholders. The United States’ interest burden was more than $800 billion in the first quarter, and the higher the debt grows, the bigger the interest bill will get, too.”
That is why nations typically pay down their debt during prosperous times. Now, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that interest payments on the debt will exceed defense and domestic spending combined by 2046.
Adding to all this is the suggestion that the Trump tax cuts would boost the economy so much that revenue would increase — an idea that was farcical from the beginning.
Federal spending has increased more under President Trump than it did when the Obama White House was trying to stimulate the economy during the Great Recession. Democrats have been complicit in these increases. The combination adds up to gross fiscal negligence.
