Correction Appended
As President Obama and Speaker John Boehner negotiate to resolve the looming fiscal crisis, Americans might be forgiven for believing that the nation’s problems would be solved if they could only agree on whether to raise $ 1.2 trillion or $ 1 trillion in new taxes over the next 10 years, or whether they should cut $ 850 billion rather than $ 1.2 trillion more in government spending.
This is not, unfortunately, the case. The frenzied partisan horse-trading has glossed over what is arguably the central issue of any debate over long-term fiscal policy: the kind of role we expect the government to play in the nation’s future. Not only have our political leaders failed to lay out a vision of what they hope the budget will achieve, they are pulling the wool over Americans’ eyes about the kind of budget we are about to get.
The truth is that both the president and House Republicans have agreed to shrink a critical part of the government to its smallest in at least half a century. This is regardless of which trillion-dollar proposal gains the upper hand.
Consider the president’s budget, which by law must include projections of taxing and spending over the next decade. Loath to raise taxes on the middle class yet unwilling to cut deeply into the budgets for Social Security or Medicare, the president and his advisers proposed cutting the discretionary part of the budget devoted to everything except defense and other security agencies to 1.7 percent of economic output by 2022, down from 3.1 percent last year.
This is not irrelevant spending. It accounts for every government expenditure except entitlements, security and interest. It pays subsidies for higher education and housing assistance for the poor. It finances the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. It pays for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and training programs for unemployed workers. Without such spending, the government becomes little more than a heavily armed pension plan with a health insurer on the side.
House Republicans are equally if not more frugal. The House budget resolution, the Republicans’ last detailed proposal about taxes and spending, refers to discretionary spending except national defense, a broader category than that considered in the president’s budget. They too cut it to the bone: to about 2.1 percent of economic output in 2022, from 4.3 percent last year.
To put it in perspective, this would cut the government’s civilian discretionary budget to the smallest it has been as a share of the economy at least since the Eisenhower administration — when a quarter of the population lived under the poverty line, thousands of children still contracted polio each year and fewer than one in 12 Americans older than 25 had a college degree. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, even going over the so-called fiscal cliff would not cut it as deeply.
“This is no way to run a $ 3.7 trillion enterprise,” said a Columbia University economist, Jeffrey Sachs, referring to the size of the federal government. “It is President Obama’s responsibility to put forward a plan and give us a comprehensive view of what is the strategy.”
The numbers for civilian discretionary spending shrink so much under both the president’s and the House Republicans’ budget proposals that even those who wrote them seem to have a hard time believing they will come true.
Rather than specify how all the required cuts would affect spending on specific programs, like housing assistance, Pell grants or the National Science Foundation, the budget writers put hundreds of billions of unspecified savings under a hazy budget line called “allowances” — which essentially means cuts to be determined later, in the course of the decade. They are what Richard Kogan, a tax expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, calls “the magic asterisk.”
President Obama’s budget has almost $ 200 billion worth of allowances. The House Republican proposal included almost $ 1 trillion. “In my personal opinion, the defense and nondefense spending caps won’t hold until 2021,” Mr. Kogan said. “At some point the deficit will look small enough and the pressure to provide services and benefits will appear large enough that Congress will find ways around them.”
Mr. Sachs’s critique comes from the president’s left, where there is widespread belief that the nation needs more tax revenue to avoid sacrificing important government programs. But economists to the president’s right share the concern over an opaque budgeting process that fails to address the central issue of our time.
“Either we reform entitlements or we accept large tax increases or we crowd out everything else the government does,” noted R. Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia Business School, who advised the Republican nominee Mitt Romney during the last presidential campaign. “People need to have that discussion.”
We’ve had this debate several times before. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was based on the proposition that government should play a much bigger role to guarantee Americans’ economic security. In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson asserted the government’s responsibility to alleviate the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Three decades ago, President Ronald Reagan changed course, ushering in an era of government retrenchment that persisted pretty much unabated until we were walloped by the Great Recession.
Today, our public finances are caught between these two appetites: our preference for lower taxes and our unwillingness to accept cuts to entitlements set up in our bygone Big Government era. The average federal income tax rate is at its lowest in more than 30 years. Still, nearly half of all Americans say their income taxes are too high. And most Americans do not want government to cut spending on Medicare or Social Security.
Unwilling to confront voters with the tension between these choices, it is perhaps natural that our leaders would take the ax to discretionary spending outside of defense, the easiest part of the budget to cut. It might also explain why they are so loath to tell us what they are doing. But this reticence does not make for a fruitful debate about the role of government in our future.
Mr. Sachs recalls confronting Gene Sperling, who heads President Obama’s National Economic Council, about how civilian discretionary spending shrinks in the president’s budget. Mr. Sperling’s reply suggests the president knows the cost-cutting is getting out of hand: “Jeff, we have a problem with that number, too.”
E-mail: [email protected]; Twitter: @portereduardo
Correction: December 19, 2012, Wednesday
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this column misspelled the middle name of the dean of Columbia Business School. He is R. Glenn (not Glen) Hubbard.
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