Dear Vice President Harris: Where are your spending cuts?

OPINION:

In 1982, the federal budget deficit rose above $100 billion for the first time (those were the good old days), and President Ronald Reagan agreed to an infamous budget deal with House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. Democrats would agree to $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. Reagan foolishly agreed to the deal. The taxes went up. The spending cuts never materialized.

Reagan would fume for the rest of his presidency, “I’m still waiting for those three dollars of spending cuts.”

Back then, Democrats at least pretended that they would cut spending. Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, pledged that he would raise taxes only as a last resort.

How times have changed. Now, we have red ink many times as high as we did then, with the Biden-Harris administration’s baseline forecast calling for $2 trillion in deficits from now until kingdom come. Democratic leaders seem entirely untroubled by the forecast and act as if the federal credit card were unlimited.

Well, if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election, we will put that risky proposition to the test.

In the wake of the most red ink in American history, Ms. Harris has proposed no reductions in federal spending. That’s right: Not a single penny.

I’ve thoroughly searched every Harris campaign document and declaration on the economy and the budget but haven’t discovered even one program of the thousands of line-item agencies in the budget that she would close or terminate.

With Ms. Harris, it’s a big, everlasting government.

The plan is $4.6 trillion in new taxes, as The New York Times reported, to go with zero spending cuts. That means the ratio of taxes to spending cuts is infinite to one. This is despite the reality that all of the deficit is because of runaway spending, as this chart from the Congressional Budget Office acknowledges.

Republicans are hardly blameless for the ocean of red ink. But at least former President Donald Trump has proposed a presidential commission to identify ways to cut hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, theft, duplication and inefficiency in federal programs. This commission, headed by Elon Musk, is a brilliant idea.

Democrats have greeted the idea with contempt. Their tolerance of government waste and fraud reminds me of the famous Jack Nicholson line in “A Few Good Men”: “You can’t handle the truth!” Democrats don’t want to expose the government’s corruption and inefficiency.

Ms. Harris’ only ideas for cutting the budget are gimmicks such as Medicare price controls or revoking patents to reduce costs. These are likely to hurt the economy more than help.

We have heard from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street analysts that Ms. Harris will be better at reducing debt than Mr. Trump. They seem to agree that a $4.5 trillion tax increase on businesses and investors is just what the doctor ordered.

Have they told their clients that?

Give Kamala Harris credit. She isn’t disguising her master plan: the biggest tax-and-spend binge in American history. I just hope voters are paying attention.

• Stephen Moore is the host of “Moore Money” on WABC and co-author of the forthcoming book “The Trump Economic Miracle.”