Tuesday night, the establishment did what it does best — breaking promises at the expense of young people.
The budget deal, as is true with most compromises, left no one particularly happy. But while you’d expect some disappointment when bringing together vastly different ideologies and demands, this specific deal turned out worse than many of the most pessimistic expectations. Here’s why.
For starters, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) reneged on his earlier promise to only replace the sequester with real cuts to mandatory spending, the true driver of the national debt. Instead, this deal does the opposite: it increases spending — and fees — while ignoring entitlements. In essence, the only thing Ryan accomplished is to give up one of the country’s only significant advances on the spending front in decades.
While the spending caps passed in 2011 as part of the Budget Control Act are no one’s ideal method for curbing spending, they have proven to be an incredibly powerful tool for keeping discretionary expenditures in check. As Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal wrote back in August, for the first time since the Korean War, spending has gone down in two consecutive years.
And now?
Well, the budget conference committee’s deal all but invalidates sequestration, while the long-term drivers of our national debt remain untouched. It’s a small victory that not all of the sequester has been ignored (72 percent of its savings remain intact), and perhaps with regular funding established, Congress can finally concentrate on major budget reforms. But it takes quite a sunny view of Washington to assume anything good will happen.
Naturally, creating compromise is always difficult, especially with the President and many in both parties determined to get rid of the sequester altogether. But with our generation facing out-of-control debt, it’s a bad outcome to give up ground already gained and raise spending to $1.012 trillion and $1.016 trillion in the next two years.
Sure, there are a few small reasons to appreciate the proposal Ryan struck with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), namely the fact that while the deal included an unacceptable increase in top-line spending, a tradeoff has been made to secure funding levels for the federal government. This means two years of basic, fiscal stability without government shutdowns or fights over temporary spending bills that could increase federal spending even more. At the very least, a move away from political brinksmanship and toward solutions, however imperfect, is laudable.
But in the end, the issue comes down to commitments. Congress passed into law the small spending reform contained in the sequester. Now, not three years later, they are treating the sequester not as established law but as just another bargaining chip in political negotiations.
If Congress can’t keep its promises or even abide by its own laws, why should we trust elected officials to ever gin up the courage necessary to deal with our fiscal problems? How can we trust Congress to sustain mandated cuts in the future if the very politicians who created the spending caps are trying to reverse them?
These budget negotiations were an opportunity to set the country on-track for sound fiscal footing. Unfortunately, the result sacrifices the most effective tool in the spending reformers’ arsenal for increased spending and costs to Americans. One step forward, two steps back.
