OPINION:
When I first arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1983, the federal budget was still below $1 trillion and the debt was still under $1.5 trillion. Just a little more than three decades later, the federal budget is four times larger and the debt now exceeds $18 trillion. No matter who is in charge of the nation’s finances, the budget is like the Energizer Bunny: It just keeps going and growing.
But the stakes in this year’s budget barroom brawl between President Obama and congressional Republicans are higher than usual. A lot higher. About $2.6 trillion higher over the next five years. That is how much more the president would spend than Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, the author of the Republican budget plan. That number is larger than Italy’s entire gross domestic product.
Mr. Price’s budget plan is almost diametrically the opposite of the Obama fiscal plan. The GOP blueprint would repeal Obamacare and all its taxes and spending programs. It would eliminate scores of wasteful programs. It makes room for tax reform, a needed ingredient to growth. It turns many of the welfare programs back over to the states. It balances the budget by 2024.
Mr. Price would also stick to the budget caps and saves the sequestration process, which are critical to preserving some modicum of fiscal discipline in Washington.
Mr. Obama’s budget by contrast, raises the spending levels from $3.5 trillion for fiscal 2014 to more than $4.2 trillion in 2017. It busts through the caps with nearly $200 billion in new spending initiatives, such as his massive infrastructure bank. After 2018, it returns the deficit to half a trillion dollars or more for as far as the eye can see.
It allows Obamacare to add millions more Americans to the government health care dole, including Medicaid.
Mr. Price tells me the “goal of this budget is to accelerate economic growth through smaller government and tax reform.” He points out that if he can get growth up from the anemic 2 percent Obama norm to 3.5 percent, he can raise at least $3 trillion more revenues over the next decade. This is the right way to bring in tax receipts: by raising profits, incomes and employment.
Mr. Obama may still have the upper hand in this clash, because he wants to play Santa Claus to voters. Republicans say they want lower spending and balanced budgets, but when the liberals ring the alarm that Republicans want to nuke Social Security and Medicare, and to send grandma over the cliff in her wheelchair, the GOP runs for the high grass.
The accompanying chart shows two paths. Under the Obama deficit path, red ink reigns supreme every year. Under the Price budget, balance is reached by 2024.
But is this goal of a balanced budget really such a hard thing to achieve? For most years throughout our history, government borrowing only happened during times of war, recession or giant land acquisitions such as the Louisiana Purchase.
Now we borrow during good times, bad times, during periods of peace, and for whatever reason imaginable. The budget has been balanced four times in the last half-century. We’re borrowing at a clip of more than $4,000 a year for every family in America — year after year after year. This is a grim legacy we are leaving for our children, and soon interest payments will become the single largest expenditure item in the budget.
Some Republicans want to spend more than Mr. Price has proposed. However, Mr. Price would spend some $600 billion on the military next year (including $94 billion for “Overseas Contingency Operations”), which is more than the next 10 countries combined. Yet, Mac Thornberry, Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, says that under the GOP budget and the budget caps, “the country cannot meet its national security responsibilities.”
That may be, but shouldn’t we start seeing the national debt as the greatest threat to our survival? A nation with an $18 trillion mortgage has a clear and present danger already inside its gates.
Mr. Obama’s tax-and-spend policies have run up the debt by more than $7.5 trillion in six years in office. He would allow the giant entitlement programs to nearly double in size over the next decade. Almost no one outside this White House believes these are healthy or sustainable trends.
Mr. Price’s budget isn’t perfect; in fact, even under the GOP plan, spending rises from nearly $3.8 trillion to $5.1 trillion over the next decade. But he at least makes an honest effort to stem the tide of red ink. It’s time for Congress to man up and save our country before we drown.
• Stephen Moore is an economist at the Heritage Foundation and a Fox News contributor.
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