Our Government’s Fiscal Insanity is Immune to Vaccine

My wife and I have a modest income and we donate to charities in a similar modest fashion.  Like most folks, there are certain causes that are near and dear to our hearts and that is where we direct our limited charitable dollars.  What might somewhat distinguish us among most donors is the fact that I make a sizeable effort to research the entities that we donate money to.  I utilize the large amount of internet information about charitable organizations and try to match up the cause with a solid record of efficiency and effectiveness.  I look for the outfits that deliver 90 cents or more out of every dollar to the cause which they claim to serve.  There are simply too many solid organizations out there doing good jobs to throw your money at one that will line their own administrative pockets with your donation.

Our elected representatives in the Senate and the House also have to make spending choices.  And since it is not their own money they are spending, it is not unlike donating to charity.  Politicians are oftentimes motivated to run for public office because of a sincere concern they hold for a public cause.  It might be health care; it might be immigration; it might be national defense; or it might be agriculture.  There is one thing it will not be and that is deficit consciousness.  They seem to lose their enthusiasm for their beneficiaries once the money is appropriated; they don’t do the heavy lifting to monitor exactly how the money is spent.

This last week saw both President Trump’s Administration and Democratic leaders in Congress doing end zone dances about reaching a two-year fiscal budget deal.  They each spun the agreement as a compromise in which they dutifully protected their personal interests; Trump with his defense dollars and the Democrats with their domestic spending.  What they don’t talk about is the idiocy of claiming a compromise when no one gave up anything at all.  Each side dramatically increased the amount of federal spending for their own priorities.  When we see both sides in a negotiation get all they want in the final agreement; that is not a compromise.  That is capitulation on principle. 

The agreement must now pass Congress and go to the President’s desk for signature and that appears to be quite likely.  Fiscal sobriety has fallen out of fashion in WDC.   This particular agreement pegs federal spending at $1.37 trillion in fiscal year 2020 with an increase of that figure to follow in FY21.  It goes without saying that our leaders in WDC have totally lost all awareness of what additional zeros at the end of a number mean.  Now I understand that Trump and the Republicans are sick and tired of spitting into the wind every time a budget bill comes up.  In today’s political culture, there is simply no reward for being a deficit hawk and trying to curtail the outrageous spending habits of the U.S. government.  It was likely foolish to think that a person of privilege like Donald Trump would bring any sense of fiscal responsibility to the table; he has never had to deal with doing without anything at all.  But it still stings to see how quickly the Republicans folded in this latest deal and how they so easily agreed to throw away the spending sequester and cap arrangements that had been so difficult to achieve.

I think a large part of the problem that deficit-conscious members of Congress have in selling fiscal accountability to their constituents is the fashion in which they approach it.  First off, let us understand that in WDC a spending cut is not really a cut at all.  If a federal agency or program has been realizing an annual spending increase of 10 percent, our elected officials consider anything less than a 10 percent increase in the coming fiscal year a cut.    This type of arithmetic would be ruinous to us as individuals; but it is the discipline du jour in WDC.  The real crime of this approach is its exploitation of the fact that we have all become quite desensitized to these huge federal expenditure numbers.  This philosophy allows departmental and agency waste and inefficiency to become institutionalized.  Most of us deal with thousands in single digits, tens, or maybe hundreds.  Take that up to the next level of millions, billions, and trillions and those additional zeros begin to lose their significance.  However, what most people do understand is waste, corruption, and inefficiency.  These are concerns that we each have to live with every day of our lives in order to buy food, have a place to live, and provide for our families.  If the negotiation focus is simply on the numbers and not on what drives the numbers, few people actually get the point.  That point is the abysmal duplication and irresponsibility in how our government administers its business.  If that was the focus regarding runaway federal spending, more people would be concerned about it.

Nothing on this planet comes closer to achieving immortality than a government program.  So many times we see a government program created and designed to meet a temporary need; only to see it continually renewed and eventually become a permanent fixture in the federal budget.  There are many problems with this approach; but not enough time or ink to address them.  The one most prominent that I will address is that when a government program is replaced by another government program (a new and improved government program, of course), the old program that is supposedly being replaced does not go away.  It continues to be funded into the future and we end up with multiple government programs all addressing the same concern.  Now they (the government) will sometimes play rhetorical games and claim that the different programs address different aspects of the same problem.  This is nonsense.  It is far more efficient and effective to place the entire problem under one departmental or agency umbrella so that a firm grasp can be achieved and maintained on the remedies.  This phenomenon is not really dissimilar to the personal finance trap that many consumers fall into with multiple credit cards.  For various reasons, people will accumulate debt on two, three, or more credit cards when one card would serve just fine.  At some point, the cumulative debt simply loses its relevance.

The federal failure to address these inefficiencies is even more regrettable due to the fact that the government is uniquely designed in a way that makes these improvements quite achievable.  The federal workforce has many, many people who retire every year; these people do not have to be replaced.  Attrition can work wonders over time…if it is ever initiated.  The government has a myriad of personnel and budgetary tools that it can use to begin a serious process of establishing some measure of transparency and accountability in the operations of departments and agencies.  It simply lacks the will to do it.  After all, it prints it own money and writes it own budget.

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The federal budget was once balanced in my lifetime.  During the Clinton Administration in the nineties when President Clinton was promoting a centrist Democratic philosophy and a Republican-controlled Congress was promoting hyper budget-consciousness, a booming economy and a muted federal spending appetite combined to actually balance the federal budget for a year or two.  Since that time, both national parties have pretty much run up the surrender flag on doing battle with the federal deficit and it seems that nobody really cares about it anymore.  The fact that we now have such a robust national economy makes it all the more tragic that in this time of relative prosperity, we are making no effort whatsoever to examine ways to decrease our federal spending deficit. 

As we continue to celebrate without reservation those rare times when our U.S. economy is hitting on all cylinders and all is well; it would serve us well to consider the burden we are passing on to our children and grandchildren who will someday deal with the debt we are so selfishly piling up.  We don’t need the simplistic plans about balancing the federal budget in five or ten years.  We don’t need to know how great this or that cause is and how wonderful it is that the government can take our tax dollars and rectify it.  We don’t need to hear about how big a sacrifice it is that federal agency XYZ will only grow at a rate of 7 percent next year instead of the 12 percent that it has been accustomed to.  What we need is a sober, deliberate, accounting of how we spend our federal largesse.  With tax dollar revenues now reaching historic high levels, it is time to carefully examine exactly what government should pay for and what is better left to the private sector.  It is about time that federal agencies return to zero-based budgeting and submit detailed, transparent, and justified projected budgets for upcoming fiscal years.  It is time that somebody, somewhere, takes the time and makes the effort to analyze the duplicative nature of our government and begins to consolidate and eliminate agencies based on the areas of their overlap. 

Over the last few decades, there have been occasional efforts by both national parties, either separately or collectively, to address the waste, duplication, and inefficiency in our government.  But these efforts were doomed to failure from their inception.  They lacked sufficient broad-based political support and suffered with insufficient authorities and resources to achieve their missions.  In an ironic way, they were in fact symptoms of the very illness they purported to address.  They were a new government entity created to address a problem that already had multiple government entities addressing it.  We have permanent, standing Committees in both Houses of Congress whose explicit duty is to oversee the fiscal operations of federal departments and agencies.  We have a government agency, the General Accounting Office, whose primary purpose is to support and assist these members of Congress in this effort.  The point is that there is no need to create any new entity to address profligate federal spending; those entities already exist.  What we need is for those entities, and the people who comprise them, to get serious about getting our federal fiscal house in order.  We don’t have to have an epiphany or miracle cure; we just need to get moving in the right direction. 

This is what makes the debacle that is federal spending so infuriating.  The system is there to address it.  The consequences of failing to address it are very obvious and indisputable.  We certainly have the ability to do something about it; especially now with a good economy.  All we lack is the will and the discipline to deal with it in practical, realistic terms.  Of all the misguided, hypocritical, nonsensical, deceiving, and irresponsible things that our Congresses and Presidents do, chief among them might very well turn out to be their idiotic denial of a federal budget deficit crisis and the unholy visit that it will someday pay on our future generations.