The political theater surrounding the federal debt ceiling is already trending toward the absurd. Normally, the absurdities come from cynical statists who warn that trying to pair even the most modest of budgetary restraint with a debt ceiling hike is tantamount to destroying the global economy.
It’s easy to dismiss such demagoguery. What’s harder to dismiss is when the enemies of even modest spending restraint are one’s alleged allies. Such is the case inside the Republican Party, which not only has to wrestle with tried-and-true Democratic doom-mongering but former President Donald Trump’s fiscally reckless meddling as well:
Republicans have vowed not to raise the federal government’s borrowing capacity unless Biden makes steep cuts to federal spending, potentially impacting social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare. Trump’s video is a warning to his fellow party members not to go there. Instead, he suggests targeting foreign aid, cracking down on migration, ending “left wing gender programs from our military,” and “billions being spent on climate extremism.”
“Cut waste, fraud and abuse everywhere that we can find it and there is plenty there’s plenty of it,” Trump says. “But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security, don’t destroy it.
Trump is right in that there are plenty of places to make cuts and other savings. The 2022 Congressional Pig Book from Citizens Against Government Waste. Its focus: outing the earmarks (yes, they never really went away) that infest every nook and cranny of the federal budget:
This year’s release exposes 5,138 earmarks, an increase of 1,702.8 percent from the 285 in FY 2021, at a cost of $18.9 billion, an increase of 18.9 percent from the $15.9 billion in earmarks in FY 2021. The cost of the FY 2022 earmarks is 14.5 percent higher than the $16.5 billion in FY 2010, the last year prior to the moratorium, while the number of earmarks is a 43.7 percent decline from the 9,129 projects in FY 2010. Since FY 1991, CAGW has identified 116,816 earmarks costing $411.4 billion.
Still not enough? Then how about Sen. Rand Paul’s 2022 Festivus Report on waste, fraud, abuse and absurdity?
But neither of these touches Social Security, which Trump, Democrats and not a few Republicans want to take out of any debt reduction discussion. They may think it’s good politics, but it is whistling past the fiscal graveyard. As Reason’s Eric Boehm writes:
If Congress refuses to do anything to alter Social Security’s trajectory, benefit cuts will automatically kick in when the program hits insolvency. That point will be reached in 2035, according to the most recent Social Security Administration trustee’s report. If that happens, the trustees estimate that Social Security will be able to pay only 80 percent of promised benefits.
Promising to do nothing, then, amounts to promising a 20 percent benefit cut in a little more than a decade. There is no getting around that fact.
It’s a very Louis XV way to view the world. But it’s also the thinking, and the rhetoric, that has pushed the national debt to crushing levels.
The Congressional Budget Office has outlined several options for reforming the Social Security program – and helping keep it solvent past 2035. But there’s no guarantee even modest measures will be enough to keep both Social Security and Medicare solvent without a huge tax increase to keep the benefits flowing. And for those who demand they get back in benefits what they paid into the programs, the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl notes that, too, would lead to some big benefit cuts.
The bottom line: rather than putting any program off limits when it comes to spending restraint, we should insist every program be on the table – big, small, costly or cheap. Anything less only perpetuates the debt spiral.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Especially welfare and foreign aid. Do you know we send handouts to the Viet Cong and the PLO? But yeah, slash all the pork barrel crap. No more university studies of the sex life of the snail darter.
I agree with Trump. Stop foreign aid and social justice spending, roll back the 1.7T omnibus. I paid for my Social Security and Medicare. It was supposed to be in a Trust, that DC politicians have been looting like it was their personnel piggy bank. Leave it the f*ck alone
Trump is right. Cutting medicare or social security would be a step toward suicide for Republicans.
If democrat administrations had not raided social security over the years, we would not have a problem. So, don’t even talk about social security cuts until we quit with all the free programs to illegals and people to damn lazy to work.
The issue is people as well as politicians can figure out there who is entitled – those entitled because they have contributed and paid into those entitlement programs and then there are those who feel they are entitled because they breathe and nothing more.
Find a creative way to make Social Security healthy without touching promised benefits. Politicians found many creative ways to spend our hard-earned money to further their careers while unlocking the “lockbox”. They can be creative when they need to. Because if they don’t do what I and many millions of SS recipients request, they will be out of a job. I say this as a Republican. I will be a single-issue SS voter. I paid too much in over my long career, to have it reduced by the same politicians who caused the weakening in the first place.
Cut all illegals Medicare, food stamps, they are not entitled to a penny of Taxpayers Money, then those Americans on welfare if able bodied must get a job or they won’t get any help at all, stop all money going to other countries, no more money to the U.N. Not a dime, no money to planned parenthood, there are many wasteful places Taxpayers Money can be saved blm, aclu, irs., epa., nsa., fbi., cia., cut in pay for all politicians, no more retirement for them, they can save like we have to with much less than them, only obamacare ins., if they want better they can pay for it out of their salaries like we do, no more Taxpayers Money for vacations, homes, make that retroactive 40 years, fair taxes from millionaires, billionaires, no foreign companies allowed in America,
The way to fight entitlements is full employment of those of working age, and perhaps encouraging productive retirees. Study the eloquent conservative Calvin Coolidge. See Amity Shlaes on YouTube, and books.