In August 2011, the eight candidates then participating in the 2012 Republican presidential primary were offered a curious choice during one of the debates. “Say you had a deal, a real spending cuts deal,” said Fox News’ Bret Baier, following up a question from our own Byron York. “Ten-to-one, as Byron said, spending cuts to tax increases. … Who on this stage would walk away from that deal?”
They all raised their hands, expressing unanimous opposition to tax hikes. They would later receive quite a bit of criticism from liberal media outlets for taking this position.
But this week, Americans received a reminder of why that position is a perfectly reasonable one to stake out in Washington, D.C., the only town in the world where the streets are paved with bacon grease. President Obama announced last week that his new budget, which is to be released today, will call for raising federal discretionary spending by $75 billion above previously agreed levels.
Recall that as part of the deal to end their 2011 debt-ceiling standoff, Republicans and Obama agreed on spending cuts in exchange for incurring more government debt. This included budget caps and what is now known as “sequestration.” Throughout the 2012 election season, Obama boasted about the caps in the deal, using them repeatedly to rebut accusations by his opponent, Mitt Romney, that he was a big-spending liberal. Sequestration then went into effect after the election.
But now that he is freed from the constraints of voter accountability, Obama wants to undo the legacy of fiscal prudence for which he was once so eager to take credit. He now calls it “mindless austerity.”
This demonstrates why, as reasonable as trading spending cuts for tax increases sounds on the surface, in reality, it isn’t. Americans are not under-taxed today — their government is just over-hungry to devour their livelihood. When Republicans accept tax increases as part of a deal, Democrats have a way of coming back at the earliest possible moment to undo the spending cuts — to claw back what they view as their fair share of the flesh of current and future taxpayers.
The cuts involved in sequestration, far from being “mindless austerity,” are miniscule. Indeed, in many departments, sequestration permits spending increases that merely fail to keep pace with earlier expectations. It goes without saying that Congress should (and surely will) reject Obama’s request for more. Even if Congress wisely imposes more sense upon the particulars of the across-the-board cuts, discriminating between functions and programs that require more or less, spending should remain at sequestration levels.
In any event, it was a failure of the two parties to agree on entitlement reforms that led to sequestration in the first place. Leaders in Washington should feel duty-bound to implement such long-term reforms, which the nation desperately needs, before they undo it.
