Heritage Foundation budget analyst Brian M. Riedl has factored projected Katrina spending into Congressional Budget Office data and discovered that in fiscal 2006, the federal government will spend $23,638 per household. Riedl told me that -- even after adjusting for inflation -- that would be the most money the federal government has spent per household since World War II. Worse, $3,796 of next year's per-household federal spending will be borrowed money.
Even as many American families -- practicing their own fiscal discipline -- will refrain from running up new debt next year, an all-Republican federal government is preparing to charge $3,796 in their name.
Without factoring in any future recession or any future natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina, Riedl calculates that federal spending will grow to $34,484 per household by fiscal 2015, with the government borrowing $6,958 per household that year.
A large chunk of this increased federal spending will come in the Medicare program, which will jump from $335 billion in fiscal 2005 to $785 billion in fiscal 2015. That increase will be buoyed by the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement that President Bush pushed through the Republican Congress in 2003 and which is scheduled to come online next year. Comptroller General David Walker told the Senate Budget Committee in February that, over the next 75 years, this drug plan alone adds $8.1 trillion in unfunded liabilities to the government's ledgers.
Yet, the most dramatic thing that Mike Pence and the "small government" Republican Study Committee suggested in their "Operation Offset" announced last week was that Congress save $30.8 billion to help offset the costs of Katrina by delaying the start of the drug plan for just one year.
Pence and his courageous RSC colleagues deserve a medal of political valor for putting the drug plan back on the table. But it should not be delayed merely one year, it should be permanently cancelled.
As for their intra-party adversaries, Fred Barnes wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2003: "Big government conservatives are favorably disposed toward what neoconservative Irving Kristol has called a 'conservative welfare state.'" That puts them on the wrong side of history, and will, if their vision is followed, put America smack in the path of a fiscal storm that will make the one-time relief spending on this year's hurricanes look like a summer breeze.