Republicans can avert a debt crisis, but only once they’ve faced some harsh truths.
Republicans have long branded themselves as deficit hawks. From the floor of Congress to the screens of Fox News to candidate town halls and rallies, they attack “Joe Biden’s spending and deficits” and pledge to cut spending, reduce waste, and balance the budget. Nearly all of this talk should be dismissed until the Republican Party, which I have advised for years, finally backs up this rhetoric with a serious yet plausible anti-deficit agenda.
Republicans claim that their party would cut taxes, slash spending even more, and balance the budget if only those tax-and-spend Democrats would get out of the way. However, even when Republicans sweep elections, they tend to drastically expand budget deficits with tax cuts and new spending. A cynic may consider that Republican lawmakers complain endlessly about surging deficits to obscure their own continued responsibility for them.
Annual budget deficits have surpassed $2 trillion, and they’re on their way to $3 trillion within a decade. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts about $119 trillion in budget deficits over the next 30 years—$116 trillion of which is attributable to Social Security and Medicare shortfalls—and that’s under a rosy scenario of expiring tax cuts, no new spending initiatives, and low interest rates. As the following sections explain, any party that truly cares about restraining runaway deficits—rather than just using them as a cudgel to attack the other party—must stop voting for expensive new policies, and it must put Social Security, Medicare, and middle-class taxes on the table.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Dispatch (paywall)
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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation