While the clock continues to tick on the spending bills Congress should (but very likely won't) get done by the end of the government's fiscal year, it's worth noting that the deficits and debt we've already accumulated have profound national security consequences.
As the Cato Institute's Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett write, the culprit is the entitlement spending most members of Congress, in both parties, are unwilling to discuss:
Without reforms to health care and retirement benefits, other domestic and defense priorities will be increasingly squeezed. As debt levels and associated interest costs rise, economic growth will suffer. And as the share of the budget dedicated to autopilot entitlement spending expands, reduced fiscal capacity will further increase budgetary conflict over the shrinking portion of discretionary spending that Congress allocates each year.
Congress only debates 28 cents of every dollar it spends; the vast majority of federal spending goes out without congressional deliberation, primarily funding programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, among other entitlements. A new mechanism is needed to reform entitlement spending and avoid a future fiscal crisis before it's too late.
Calls for process reform, program changes and so on are hardly new. Boccia and Lett call for a commission (known by its acronym, BRAC) akin to the one that successfully closed numerous underused military bases. It was so successful that a Congress, putting local politics ahead of the national interest, has refused to reauthorize the base closure commission since 2005.
A commission that had BRAC-like power to suggest budget reductions that would take effect unless Congress specifically rejected them might gain some traction. But there are likely constitutional issues surrounding any proposal that takes a fundamental power such as budgeting out of the hands of an elected Congress and puts in those of an appointed commission.
Recall that when the Republican-led Congress gave the president a line-item veto in 1994. The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. The base closure commission didn't face the same sort of constitutional issues because it was a temporary legislative fix for what was, essentially, congressional overreach that had made closing bases nearly impossible.
The hard reality is that reducing spending will require a change of incentives among members of Congress, putting fiscal responsibility ahead of (their own) job protection.
It will also require the voting public to demand change. Voters must be willing to engage in an open, wide-ranging debate about federal spending – including entitlements. They can still vote on what they perceive to be their interests, but there will be one big upside to such a discussion: no one can say they weren't warned.
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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I have an idea. Let’s have the government take all of the money taxed from and then spent on entitlements for the people who want entitlement spending reduced. That means your Social Security and your Medicare. If you want to let your FICA taxes go down the hole of other government spending, maybe the government should take that money, and do the same for anyone who has the same opinion as you. As for me, I paid into FICA for 40+ years. If the government attempts to reduce my “entitlements”, I will help everyone involved go back to the private sector during their next elections.
I paid into Social Security from age 16 until I retired in my 60’s. I also paid into Medicare from its beginning to now. There are too many people collecting from these programs who never paid into them especially unentitled old foreigners whose relatives were supposed to support them – not American taxpayers. Also, elected officials used Social Security for their pet projects and are also the ones who have bankrupted it – yet we the workers are now expected to give-up what we paid for by the thousands-of-dollars. What needs to be done is to stop handing-out welfare tax dollars to countries who mostly don’t like the U.S. And financing wars that are not in our best interest.
People who have paid into Social Security and Medicare are entitled to get back what they have contributed. People who have not contributed are not entitled to any of that money. That includes welfare recipients, unlawful aliens and Congress.
Government, stop giving MY money to everyone else and keep your sticky fingers out of it, too. It’s not yours to hand out.
If I want to donate to the needy, there are plenty of non-profits doing good works that I can support. Otherwise, my heirs deserve my money just as much as somebody I don’t know. I prefer to make my own choices, than you very much.