Congress' Empty Budget-Cutting Promises

This week, Democrats rebuffed four party members who proposed modest spending cuts. Both parties though are guilty of avoiding the hard fiscal decisions ahead.

Democrats have angrily rebuffed a group of four party members intent on proposing a reasonably modest budget rescission package to cut $1.4 billion of unrequested but congressionally approved spending from the federal budget.  It's easy, and largely correct, to paint anti-cut Democrats as big spenders unwilling to reduce even the most wasteful spending programs.  But, to a large extent, even pro-spending cut congressional Democrats have joined with Republicans in Congress and the Obama administration in substituting theatrics and easy solutions for the hard work of budget cutting.

Let's review:  The Obama administration has, for the second year in a row, solicited money-saving ideas from federal workers while Republicans have devoted lots of web bandwidth and House floor time to moving forward YouCut agenda items (based on public votes on a website maintained by Minority Whip Eric Cantor. The proposals: let patients at VA hospitals take unused drugs home, (administration), cuts to a Clinton-era program that builds "new urbanist" public housing (Democrats), and eliminating federal pay for people who work only on union issues (Republican) are all fine ideas and could save some money. They are all worth considering. But, frankly, none of these easy-to-support, hard-to-oppose proposals are likely to make a big budget difference.

Putting aside some unrealistic proposals (Republicans say that barring the IRS from enforcing the new insurance mandate would save as much as $15 billion although the actual savings seem much, much smaller), the sum total of the savings from YouCut, administration proposals, and Democrats amount to somewhere around $5 to $15 billion a year. This is real money, but, in the context of the federal budget deficit of about $1.5 trillion, it's not going to solve any problems. Without very serious reforms to major entitlement programs that involve cutting benefits to at least some current beneficiaries, it will be impossible to close these gaps without raising at least some taxes.

It’s time for both Democrats and Republicans to make the difficult proposals needed to balance the budget. Republicans intent on avoiding any tax increase should outline a proposal to cut benefits to current and near future entitlement program recipients and Democrats should actually outline what large across the board tax increases they favor. Healthy economic growth, if it ever returns, could help close budget gaps as could smarter ways of running some government programs. In the end, reasonably small budget cut packages make good headlines but, wherever they come from, such cut proposals distract Congress and the public from the hard fiscal decisions ahead.