Peter Ferrara's Too-Nice Attack on Phony Washington Budget Deals

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Ferrara of the Institute for Policy Innovation explains that Washington budget deals don't work because politicians never follow through on promised spending cuts. This is a very relevant argument since Obama's so-called Deficit Reduction Commission supposedly is considering a deal featuring $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases (disturbingly reminiscent of what was promised - but never delivered - as part of the infamous 1982 TEFRA budget scam).

Washington's traditional approach to balancing the budget is to negotiate an agreement on a package of benefit cuts and tax increases. President Obama's deficit commission seems likely to recommend just this strategy in December. The problem is that it never works. What happens is the tax increases get permanently adopted into law. But the spending cuts are almost never fully adopted and, even if they are, they are soon swept away in the next spendthrift budget. Then—because taxes weaken incentives to produce—the tax increases don't raise the revenue that Congress initially projected and budgeted to spend. So the deficit reappears. In 1982, congressional Democrats promised President Ronald Reagan $3 in spending cuts for every dollar in tax increases. Reagan went to his grave waiting for those spending cuts. Then there was the budget deal in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush agreed to violate his famous campaign pledge—"Read my lips, no new taxes," he had said in 1988—in pursuit of a balanced budget. But after the deal, the deficit increased substantially: to $290 billion in 1992 from $221 billion in 1990.

As the excerpt indicates, Peter's column is solid and everything he writes is correct, but it suffers from one major sin of omission. He should have exposed the dishonest practice of using "current services" or "baseline" budgeting. This is the clever Washington practice of assuming that all previously planned spending increases should go into effect and categorizing any budget that increases spending by a lower amount as a spending cut. In other words, if the hypothetical "baseline" budget increases by 7 percent, and a budget is proposed that increases spending by 4 percent, that 4 percent spending increase magically gets transformed into a 3 percent spending cut.

Politicians love "current services" or "baseline" budgeting for two reasons. First, it allows them to have their cake and eat it too. They can simultaneously shovel more money to interest groups while telling voters they are "cutting" spending. Second, it rigs the process in favor of bigger government. This is because lawmakers who actually propose to restrain the growth of spending can be lambasted for wanting "savage" and "draconian" budget cuts totaling "trillions of dollars" when all they're actually proposing is to have spending grow by less than the so-called baseline. But since people in the real world use honest math rather than "current services" math, they assume that spending is being reduced next year by some large amount compared to what is being spent this year. And if the phony budget cut numbers sound too big (especially for specific programs such as Medicare or Medicaid), they sometimes conclude that it would be better to raise taxes.

Speaking of which, the same misleading process works on the revenue side of the budget. The politicians automatically get to keep whatever additional revenue is generated by population growth and higher incomes, which is not trivial since revenue in a typical year grows faster than nominal GDP. But when they do a budget deal featuring X dollars of tax increases for every Y dollars of spending cuts, the additional revenue is always on top of the revenue increases that already are occurring. And since the supposed spending cuts invariably are nothing more than reductions in planned increases, it should come as no surprise that the burden of spending always seems to increase.

Defenders of "current services" or "baseline" budgeting will respond by arguing that spending should automatically increase because of factors such as inflation and demographic change (i.e., more seniors signing up for Medicare). Indeed, they will point out that the government is legally obligated to spend more money for entitlement programs based on current law.

But that's not the point. The issue is whether the American people are being presented with honest numbers. If the fans of big government want to argue that spending should increase by 7 percent for various reasons, they should openly and honestly explain what they are trying to do. And if they disagree with lawmakers who want spending to increase by 4 percent, they should be forthright and tell voters that "this proposal does not increase spending by enough because of..." and list the reasons why they want spending to grow even faster.

Unfortunately, deceptive budget practices in Washington are a feature, not a bug. But if you pay close attention, they are very revealing. If the President's Deficit Reduction Commission uses "baseline" or "current services" budgeting as a benchmark for determining spending "cuts" and tax increases, that's a good sign that the crowd in Washington wants to pull a fast one on the American people.

Political Alchemy, Part I: Turning Spending Increases into Tax Cuts

Politicians in Washington have come up with something far more impressive than turning lead into gold or water into wine. Using self-serving budget rules, they can increase the burden of government spending and say they are cutting taxes instead.

This bit of legerdemain is made possible, thanks to the convolutions of the personal income tax, by adopting or expanding refundable tax credits. But in this case, "refundable" does not mean the government is returning money to taxpayers. Instead, it means that money is being redistributed to people who do not earn enough to be subject to the income tax.

This is hardly a trivial issue. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the amount of income redistribution being laundered through the tax code is now so large that the bottom 40 percent of the population has a negative "effective" income tax rate. In simple terms (though perhaps with profound political implications), the income tax is a revenue generator for a big share of the population.

And the problem is going to get worse if the President's budget is approved. Buried in the fine print, on pages 188-189 of the Analytical Perspective of the Budget, you will see that the President is proposing to increase this hidden form of spending by more than $152 billion over the next ten years.

It is worth noting that proponents argue that it is okay to classify this new spending as tax cuts because it somehow offsets other tax payments, especially the payroll tax. I'm sympathetic to lower taxes on everybody, including the poor, but surely it is better to be honest and simply cut the taxes that people pay. The current methodology, by contrast, is open to abuse. Heck, I'm surprised politicians don't classify other forms of spending as tax cuts. Maybe corporate welfare can be reclassified as a corporate tax cut (I better stop lest I give the political class any ideas).

Defenders also assert that some so-called refundable tax credits, particularly the earned income tax credit, are designed to encourage work. That is partly true, but credits like the EITC are withdrawn as income climbs, and this means poor people face punitive marginal tax rates, so the overall effect on hours worked may be negligible.

The right approach, of course, is to get the federal government out of the racket of redistributing income.

Weekly Economics Lesson: The Problem Is Spending, not Deficits

The Wall Street Journal has a column identifying fiscal deficits as the greatest threat to European economic performance. As this passage indicates, many European nations have enormous deficits and debt, much larger than the United States:

Excessive euro-zone deficits now present one of the biggest risks to the global recovery. Several European countries – Greece, Italy and Belgium – already have debts of more than 100% of gross domestic product. Others will join them in 2010. Across the euro zone, the deficit in 2010 is likely to be more than 7% of GDP. ...The snag is that no one knows how far or how fast countries must cut their deficits to retain the support of markets. Government bonds are being artificially supported by central-bank policies. ...Greece and Ireland's bonds already yield close to 5%, around 1.7 percentage points more than Germany's. ...If yields rise too high, deficits will become unsustainable. Medium-term, most countries need strong growth to reduce debt before they are hit by the huge demands on social spending as the baby-boomer generation retires. In theory, rising yields should impose market discipline on wayward governments. But without the traditional safety valve of devaluation, the sacrifices needed to restore competitiveness via wage deflation and falling living standards may be too much to expect from elected politicians. ...The market assumes that if one member state faced a buyers' strike, the others would ride to the rescue, despite the euro zone's no-bailout policy.

The column identifies some key concerns, but are budget deficits really the problem? Would these European nations be better off, for instance, if they imposed massive tax increases? Setting aside Laffer Curve concerns, big tax hikes could close the fiscal gap. Is it reasonable, then, to think that Europe's economies would respond with more growth? That is highly unlikely. Replacing debt-financed spending with tax-financed spending merely changes the mechanism for diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy to the government. Yes, deficits and debt undermine economic performance by draining resources from private credit markets. But higher tax rates also stifle growth by decreasing incentives to work, save, and invest.

The real problem is that government is far too big in Europe. This is the crisis, and it is a problem that America is now facing as a result of the profligate Bush-Obama policies.

Mocking the Stimulus

Writing for The Hill, I explain why Keynesian-style stimulus does not work. In addition, I note that the so-called stimulus was just an excuse for pork-barrel spending. But my concluding point, excerpted below, is that the White House goofed politically by making specific claims about the good things that supposedly would happen by increasing the burden of government spending:

The only surprise was that the White House was foolish enough to make specific claims of the good results that supposedly would flow from all the pork-barrel spending. In part, this is the absurd notion of claiming 600,000-plus “jobs saved or created” when total employment actually has fallen by more than 3 million. But the bigger mistake was claiming that the faux stimulus would keep the unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent and that failure to squander $787 billion would cause the jobless rate to climb to 9 percent. The politicians got their wish, yet now the unemployment rate is above 10 percent. Brilliant.

Fighting Critics from the Right and Left

I’ve always thought the middle of the road was for yellow stripes and dead ‘possums, so I’m instinctively uncomfortable when attacked from the right and the left. But that’s what happened with my commentary (which I also cross-posted at Cato-at-Liberty) about Bush, Obama, and the FY2009 budget deficit. Bruce Bartlett accused me of being a shill for the GOP on his facebook page, while a Redstate poster said I was giving Obama a free pass on all his spending.

I responded on Redstate, and you can click to read the entire post, but here’s the key points in my defense against attacks from the right:

Let’s deal with Mustango’s criticisms. He argues that budgets are passed by Congress, presumably implying that Nancy Pelosi, et al, should be blamed. The Speaker of the House is a complete statist, so I’m a big fan of anybody who points out her flaws, but since President Bush supported all of the wasteful spending adopted in the last year (as well as the first seven years) of his presidency, he also must bear responsibility for the results.

The second criticism is that I was letting Obama off the hook for his pork-filled stimulus. That’s definitely not the case. My blog post specifically noted that Obama bears part of the responsibility for the FY2009 deficit, but since less than $200 billion of so-called stimulus was allocated in FY2009, that is rather trivial compared to a budget deficit of more than $1.4 trillion. And even if the extra spending from the omnibus spending bill is added to Obama’s tab, his total is still less than $250 billion.

I’m sure I have plenty of flaws, but being squishy on the issue of the size of government surely is not on the list.

Don't Blame Obama for Bush's FY2009 Deficit

Some critics are lambasting President Obama for record deficits. This is not a productive line of attack, largely because it puts the focus on the wrong variable. America's fiscal problem is excessive government spending, and deficits are merely a symptom of that underlying disease. Moreover, if deficits are perceived as the problem, that means both spending restraint and higher taxes are solutions. The political class, needless to say, will choose the latter approach 99 percent of the time. A higher tax burden, however, simply means that debt-financed spending is replaced by tax-financed spending, which is akin to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, or vice-versa.

In addition to being theoretically misguided, critics sometimes blame Obama for things that are not his fault. Listening to a talk radio program yesterday, the host asserted that Obama tripled the budget deficit in his first year. This assertion is understandable, since the deficit jumped from about $450 billion in 2008 to $1.4 trillion in 2009. As this chart illustrates, with the Bush years in green, it appears as if Obama's policies have led to an explosion of debt.

But there is one rather important detail that makes a big difference. The chart is based on the assumption that the current administration should be blamed for the 2009 fiscal year. While this make sense to a casual observer, it is largely untrue. The 2009 fiscal year began October 1, 2008, nearly four months before Obama took office. The budget for the entire fiscal year was largely set in place while Bush was in the White House. So is we update the chart to show the Bush fiscal years in green, we can see that Obama is partly right in claiming that he inherited a mess (though Obama actually deserves a small share of the blame for Bush's last deficit since earlier this year he pushed through both an "omnibus" spending bill and the so-called stimulus bill that increased FY2009 spending).

It should go without saying that this post is not an argument for Obama's fiscal policy. The current President promised change, but he is continuing the wasteful and profligate policies of his big-spending predecessor. That is where critics should be focusing their attention.