Washington Times: Americans Deserve Better Than House Leadership’s Debt Ceiling Legislation

Washington Times 

If America drives off a fiscal cliff, will the crash landing at the bottom be less painful if we’re going over the cliff at 60 miles per hour rather than 80 miles per hour?

Republicans reject President Joe Biden’s 80-mph plan to increase our national debt to more than $52 trillion over the next ten years.

Republican House Leadership countered with the 60-mph plan to increase the national debt over the same ten years to “only” $47 trillion.

It is so astounding that it bears repeating—the Democrats plan a $52 trillion national debt by 2033, while Republicans plan $47 trillion.

To paraphrase former President Bill Clinton —“It’s the spending, stupid.”

The House Leadership plan has several positive aspects: elimination of the unconstitutional, Biden student loan forgiveness plan and elimination of the Green New Deal taxpayer-funded subsidies in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. Together this will save almost $700 billion.

That will not, however, have much impact on reducing the need to borrow in order to meet our federal spending this year and in future years.

In the first half of this fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office asserts that we have a deficit of more than $1.1 trillion. In just six months!

Let’s put it this way: even though we are generating a record amount of revenue for the federal government, the federal government, led by Joe Biden, the Pied Piper of modern monetary theory, is on a wild spending spree.

The House Leadership plan proposes to cap federal spending at 2022 levels next year, levels that were inflated dramatically during the COVID experience and still exceed our annual revenues. If we want to reduce our national debt, we must more aggressively address our spending levels. 

The savings proposal is the right policy, but it isn’t enough to even bend the growth in our national debt trajectory by more than a small amount.

As a Forbes writer stated: “If politicians fail to control spending, then at some point America as we know it will cease to exist.”  

If only there was a way to slow our spending down.

What if we took things back to the 2019 spending levels? Did any rational person think that our federal government of 2019 wasn’t big enough or didn’t spend enough money?

In 2019 we spent $4.4 trillion but only received $3.5 trillion in revenue.

Last year, fiscal year 2022, we received $4.9 trillion in revenue. Wow! That’s an increase of almost $1.5 trillion in revenue in just four years.

Bad news, however. In FY 2022 we spent $6.1 trillion.

Larry Lindsey, a former Board Member of the Federal Reserve, predicts that deficit spending for fiscal year 2023 will be approximately $1.75 trillion. We will spend $1.75 trillion more than we bring in. Oddly, that amount almost completely correlates to the swollen spending in Biden’s omnibus spending last December.

Congress should reduce its spending to pre-COVID, 2019 levels. It may not be the panacea. It won’t solve all our budgetary problems. Those problems are simply too big, resulting from too many years of profligacy.

Going back to 2019 spending numbers, however, will bend the trajectory down and give us a better chance at overcoming the spending that accompanies a federal government that is unconstitutionally large, ubiquitous, and tyrannical.

Saving money by preventing spending on Green New Deal subsidies and illegally manipulated student loan debt is important but fails to address the greater systemic problem of outspending our revenue by an average of more than $100 billion per month.

With the House passage of the debt ceiling legislation, some may think that this question has been resolved, but the Senate and White House are signaling the House plan is dead on arrival. When the House sets the, no doubt, grossly irresponsible bill back from the Senate, House Leadership should put a bill that returns spending to 2019 levels up for a vote. Then we will know if Republicans are serious about bending the spending trajectory downward.

Going off the cliff at the Republicans’ 60-mph or the Democrats’ 80 mph results in the same thing: a horrific crash. The America post-fiscal apocalypse is what Forbes writer Mike Patton correctly describes as an America that will cease to exist as we have known it.

Republican Congressman Andy Biggs represents Arizona’s Fifth Congressional District and serves on the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight & Accountability Committee.