By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
Balancing a budget is hard. I know, because that’s my job in my household. So I can empathize with U.S. Rep. Steve Womack.
Here are some things I’ve found to be true after spending countless hours crunching our family’s numbers.
– Much of your spending is difficult to cut. Your house payment, insurance, taxes, and many bills are almost set in stone. Such “mandatory spending” can consume the majority of your income.
– You can cut your “discretionary spending,” but it’s not easy. Spending less on groceries requires constant vigilance and an altered lifestyle. Also, discretionary spending includes nice-to-have “extras” that provide many benefits at relatively low cost, like subscriptions and community center memberships. Church and charitable giving are discretionary as well. Cut those?
– Because the above options are hard, you might tell yourself you can reduce “waste” and not have to change your lifestyle. That’s wishful thinking.
– Don’t assume a budget alone will give you the discipline tomorrow that you lack today. You must change your expectations and make unpleasant decisions daily, or you’ll burst through that paper ceiling you’ve created.
– Finally, it’s tempting to assume that current realities will be future realities. Unfortunately, despite my best-laid plans, expenses will arrive unexpectedly (like a hurricane). And what if my income suddenly dropped?
These same realities face Womack, who represents Arkansas’ 3rd District and has one of the most thankless jobs in Washington – being the new chairman of the House Budget Committee. Congress not only can’t pass a balanced budget, but it often can’t even pass a budget at all. The good news for Womack: Expectations are low.
Earlier this week, the committee (actually, the Republicans on it) unveiled a budget they say will balance – in nine years.
One way it achieves this balance is by instructing other committees to save $302 billion in mandatory spending, which is about two-thirds of the federal budget. The bulk of this mandatory spending comes from popular programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Admirably, Womack is at least talking about these politically sensitive issues. Because they are growing so rapidly, the budget cannot be balanced without reducing their growth relative to the growth of the economy.
But like my mortgage payment, they are difficult to cut, although for different reasons: The bank won’t let me lower my bill, and the voters won’t let Congress cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. If your grandmother lives in a nursing home, she probably benefits from all three. It’s hard to see how a budget passed in 2018 will make Congress do over the next nine years what it won’t do now.
As for cuts to discretionary spending – the kind, like my grocery bill, that Congress exercises more control over – the budget calls for actually increasing military spending while cutting other government programs. Some of these aren’t must-have, but are nice to have.
Here’s an example of how hard that will be. The budget assumes that Congress will adopt a “rescission” request by President Trump that would cut $15 billion in appropriated funding – not really spending, but the authority to spend. For a country that’s $21 trillion in debt and going deeper by the minute, this is nothing.
Womack announced the budget blueprint on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the rescission bill failed in the Senate.
In many ways, the blueprint faces the same challenges I face when trying to balance our household budget. It depends on scenarios that are easier to put on paper than they are to enact, or to get others to enact. It relies on future discipline when today’s discipline is lacking. It calls for reducing waste and offers a plan for how to do so, but cutting waste is hard. It depends on a relatively modest economic growth rate of 2.6 percent annually, but what if the economy tanks? And what if multiple natural disasters occur, or the United States goes to war again?
The blueprint comes from the same Congress that in the past few months has voted for tax cuts and spending increases that will make the national debt $2.4 trillion bigger than it would have been, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Womack voted for all of it.
Still, I wish him the best. Balancing a budget is hard, in my house and in the House.
To propose cuts in Medicare (or privatization, which would increase health care costs to the government), Medicaid, Social Security, community assistance programs, and end all Affordable Care Act spending, is to increase our already dire numbers of children, families, and elderly that live in poverty. In Arkansas, 1 of every 4 children does not have enough food to eat, with the same number, 26%, of adults ages 65 and over living on such low incomes that they cannot afford nutritious food. Medicare costs to those who benefit go up every year, a program that we paid for during all the years we worked (I’m 69). The solution? Stop giving the upper income earners, the rich, and corporations tax cuts. The richest people in the USA can afford to pay more in taxes, not less. They can give up some of those luxuries their wealth give them – the working class cannot give up more than they have already lost in financial security. The United Nations is right: The USA is now a country with 40 million living in poverty, living without affordable housing, adequate food, living wages, access to health care – yet Trump and his administration – and Steve Womack – want to take more away. Remember this when voting in November, 2018.
Thanks for reading and for writing, Sara. I appreciate your perspective. While the national debt is now $21 trillion, the fiscal gap between what the government has promised in future benefits and what it will raise in future revenues is in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. If we refuse to make any changes to those social programs, then it won’t be enough just to increase taxes on rich people. There will have to be significant tax increases on the middle class as well. If that’s what we want to do, then that’s fine. But we’re going to have to face some tough math realities one way or the other.
Sara, yes, hopefully a big blue wave, maybe even a tsunami, will wash a huge amount of Republicans out to political sea in the November elections.
Good column, Steve. We should have reformed Social Security over a decade ago without affecting those currently receiving or near to receiving benefits, but Congress proved to be gutless. We can fix health insurance as well; there are plenty of examples from other countries to look to for guidance. And we could balance the budget in five years if the American people regarded it as a top priority.
Hi, Ken. I think there will be a blue wave but not a tsunami. I agree that we could have fixed these problems years ago and still can, but it takes courage, which is in short supply. For that reason, I don’t think a blue wave will solve anything. Note the title of this blog!
Ken, not to be contrarian, but historically speaking neither blue nor red have great records when it comes to balanced budgets, let alone debt reduction. Maybe what we should push for are a few new colors to pick from. I don’t know much about mixing colors, but we need to find something that when mixed together with varying amounts of red and blue will put our country in the black.
Jerry, as a new Social Security recipient I lean toward solving the budget issue through raising taxes and keeping benefits for current recipients. And I trust Democrats over Republicans in that regard.