Yesterday, I unloaded on supposed conservatives who are toying with a tax increase to enable more government spending.
Why would they take that route in the “Supercommittee” deliberations, I wondered, when they can deliver a guaranteed victory for taxpayers by holding firm and allowing a sequester to occur, which would automatically slow the growth of federal spending?
Many of the beltway elites seem to think a sequester would be catastrophic, leading to “savage” and “draconian” budget cuts.
This is nonsense. As I’ve already explained, a sequester simply means that spending climbs by $2 trillion between now and 2021 rather than climbing by $2.1 trillion (see this chart).
If that’s “savage” and “draconian,” then I suppose we should hospitalize 300-pounders for anorexia when they trim their toenails.
The Wall Street Journal’s editors are equally dismissive of the anti-sequester hysteria among the politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interest groups. Here’s some of what they had to say.
…the sequester does have the virtue of imposing reductions in spending that Congress rarely agrees to on its own. …This would yield $68 billion in savings in 2013, and more savings in future years by ratcheting down the baseline level of spending. …Total domestic discretionary spending doubled to $614 billion in 2010 from $298 billion in 2000. Even if there were a 10-year $1.2 trillion “cut,” total discretionary spending would still rise by $83 billion by 2021 because those cuts are calculated from inflated “current services” projections. …If the super committee choice is between a tax increase that would hurt the economy or letting the sequester strike in 2013, go with the sequester.
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And in a column on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, former Senator Phil Gramm, along with a Capitol Hill budget expert, Mike Solon, echoed these sentiments. Here are some key passages.
As markets and the media conclude that the congressional super committee on deficit reduction is likely to fail, public attention is increasingly focused on the “draconian” across-the-board cuts that will ensue. …Across-the-board cuts are clearly inferior to rationally setting priorities, but they’d be far from debilitating. Spending has grown so fast in the last five years that even if the cuts are triggered, total spending in 2013 would still be a whopping $3,582 billion—32% more than projected by the Congressional Budget Office in January 2007. Even after adjusting for inflation, real nondefense discretionary spending would be up $41 billion, or 7.6%, and real defense discretionary spending would be up $77 billion, or 13%. …The super committee should write a good plan now if it can do so, but it should not take a bad deal that could hurt the economy and further Hellenize America’s debt crisis. The committee members should bear in mind that help is just an election away.
Gramm and Solon also explain that it will be very easy to modify a sequester after the 2012 election, so pro-defense hawks should not be fearful of a sequester – which was the point I made in an earlier post.
For all intents and purposes, the Supercommittee fight is a battle to see whether the GOP has shed the corrupt big-spending mentality of the Bush years. This should be an easy choice for a party that believes in limited government. The fact that we’re even having this discussion is not an encouraging sign.
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