Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., betrays conservatism by working to avoid existing budget caps rather than embracing them.
McConnell is rightly concerned that the caps will require a $71 billion reduction in planned defense spending if no broader budget deal is reached. The Pentagon does need the money. But it’s not worth the extra $55 billion (or more) per year in utterly unnecessary domestic spending that busting the caps will entail.
If no deal is reached, that’s how much money will be “sequestered,” or saved via blunt, across-the-board spending reductions, from each part of the discretionary budget. Federal agencies should be told now to start planning for those cuts. With a federal debt above $22 trillion, which is more than 100% of gross domestic product, and with unfunded future liabilities exceeding $120 trillion, the United States just cannot afford to keep spending exorbitant amounts for discretionary programs.
Everyone can agree President Bill Clinton was no heartless skinflint. I can testify to that, having worked for the House Appropriations Committee for a few years during his presidency. For a good example of reasonable discretionary spending in a time of economic growth, take the final non-election year of his presidency — 1999, when Congress produced the fiscal 2000 budget, after Clinton had regained clout by routing congressional Republicans in post-impeachment polling.
Domestic discretionary spending in 2000 was $284 billion. In inflation adjusted dollars, that would be the same as $414 billion in 2018. Even also adding 16% for population growth would still raise that spending category only to $480 billion. Instead, our profligate federal government spent $722 billion domestically, not even counting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In other words, it spent, comparing apples to apples, a gobsmacking $242 billion more on domestic discretionary spending than the levels thought adequate, and signed into law, by Clinton. (See table 5.6, here.)
Sure, costs related to “homeland security” rose after the 2001 terrorist attacks, but hardly by that amount. Most of the functions at the since-created Department of Homeland Security were already in the budget before 9/11, just in other parts of the federal government. Still, if the entire $98 billion for homeland security — a one-year anomaly, because the DHS budget both before and after 2019 is some $40 billion less — were removed, domestic discretionary spending would remain nearly $150 billion higher, in inflation-and-population-adjusted dollars, than it was in 2000. (Table 5.4, here.)
The feds could sequester the full $55 billion at issue today, and remove all costs for homeland security, and still be overspending the Clinton baseline by $90 billion.
Note, too, that in times of a strong economy, such as today’s lowest unemployment rate in 50 years, domestic spending should go down, not up, because the need for social spending should diminish.
Rather than buckle to demands for higher domestic spending now, congressional Republicans should be willing to let the existing budget caps kick in via sequestration, if need be. Then, beginning from the lower baseline, make the case for added military spending, which the public largely supports.
Meanwhile, for each additional Democratic demand for “new” domestic spending, Republicans should highlight the average per-family tax cost required to pay for it.
In sum, with just a modicum of strategic public-relations competence, Republicans could and should build the case for more defense spending without much additional domestic spending. To do so would be reasonably good politics and much, much more responsible public policy.
