For starters, he wants to cut taxes—”big league.” The Tax Foundation estimates that the Trump plan would reduce federal revenues by $4.4 to $5.9 trillion over the course of a decade. Under dynamic scoring, whereby the growth of the economy is factored into the analysis, that number drops to somewhere between $2.6 and $3.9 trillion.
Trump also wants to spend more on infrastructure. Last week, McClatchy published a list of about 50 projects that the Trump administration envisions as public-private partnerships. The total price tag is estimated at $137.5 billion—a lot of dough for Uncle Sam, even if the private sector picks up some of the tab. Trump also promised to increase funding for the Veterans Administration and suggested that veterans should be treated by any doctor that accepts Medicare—an idea that sounds great, but would be expensive. Trump intends to end the military sequester, which has a 10-year price tag of about $1 trillion. In a September speech, he promised to “ask Congress to fully offset the costs of increased military spending.”
But where will such savings be found? The good news is that Trump has nominated Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina congressman and noted budget hawk, as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Perhaps he will be a rigorous steward of the public finances. The bad news is that the administration already seems to have taken entitlement reform off the table. A few days before the inauguration, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus told ABC News, “There are no plans in President-elect Trump’s policies moving forward to touch Medicare and Social Security.” This is despite the fact that these programs are the main drivers of our long-term debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s 2016 long-term outlook, by 2046 the shortfall from these two entitlements alone will total nearly 6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. That is an astounding sum—yet Trump has no desire to rein in these costs.
Sure, the president has talked about eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” from our entitlement system, as well as generating such outstanding economic growth that our fiscal hole will fill itself. This elides the fundamental problem, however, especially with Medicare: People receive a lot more in benefits than they ever pay in. According to Chris Conover of the American Enterprise Institute, by 2030 a high-earning couple will receive nearly $360,000 in lifetime Medicare benefits, for just over $180,000 in lifetime payments. This is not a social insurance program; it is a social welfare program.
If Trump is not going to cut entitlements, he is not going to find the money he needs. Slashing the National Endowment for the Humanities might drive some nice headlines on conservative blogs, but it is basically a rounding error in the federal budget. The main drivers are military spending, which Trump wants to increase, and entitlements, which Trump wants to leave unchanged. He could, alternatively, call for tax hikes to pay for increased spending, but instead he wants massive tax cuts.
The result of his proposals will therefore be a substantial increase in the federal debt.
This is deeply anti-republican. The preamble to the Constitution calls for government that secures “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” meaning that the welfare of future generations is one purpose of today’s government, even if those generations do not yet participate in civil society. Our deficits, in effect, enable voters today to benefit from federal largesse at the expense of our posterity.
Our Founding Fathers would be appalled by this. While Alexander Hamilton thought that our national debt could be a “national blessing,” he never imagined it as a tool to burden our children to make life easier for ourselves. Thomas Jefferson was an extreme deficit hawk. He once argued to James Madison that because “the dead have neither powers nor rights” over the earth, “no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of it’s [sic] own existence.” Madison would eventually take a similarly staunch view on public debt, but he responded to Jefferson’s letter by noting there may have to be exceptions to this rule, as “debts may be incurred for purposes which interest the unborn, as well as the living,” like repelling a foreign invasion. Exceptions or no, neither Madison nor Jefferson (nor for that matter Hamilton) would abide the notion of a massive debt due to the political inconvenience of raising revenues sufficient to pay for expenditures, which is what we’re seeing today.
In addition to violating republican norms, the deficit is the key to the political success of big government. Our federal leviathan thrives by distributing benefits in excess of the burdens it imposes. That way, every voter can, in theory, receive more from the state than he pays in taxes. Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch, but with deficit spending the burdens are systematically shifted to future generations—who, conveniently, cannot vote. If every current voter can receive more than he pays in, then each has an incentive to vote for ever-larger government. On the other hand, if the government were to disclaim deficit spending, every benefit increase for one person would require a sacrifice by another, who would then become a countervailing force to an ever-expanding state.
If the GOP really wishes to stop the growth of government, it must rebrand itself an anti-deficit party. Back in 2009-2010, Barack Obama and congressional Democrats spent like drunken sailors, just as the GOP warned during the 2008 campaign. But people did not trust the party—in no small part because when it had total control over the government, it too spent irresponsibly. If the public were actually to believe that Republicans are committed to fiscal discipline, they’ll take future GOP warnings about Democratic profligacy more seriously.
Controlling deficit spending should thus be a priority for this government. Congressional Republicans will have to hold the line should the new president turn out to be as spendthrift as he has indicated he will be.
Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
