By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Here’s a simple request of our elected officials when they gather in Washington next year with Republicans in charge of everything: If you’re going to cut taxes, please cut spending, too.

I make that request for the future because I am not reassured by the past – not the past year, or the last 35, or the last 200.

Since 1790, the United States has been in a continual state of debt. There was a brief period in the mid-1830s when the debt was very small – it even briefly was paid off in 1835. But it reached $1 billion in 1863 during the Civil War and has never looked back. It has grown smaller at times as a percentage of gross domestic product, but the overall trajectory has been ever higher. In fact, the last time the United States owed less one year than the previous one was 1957, according to the government’s own Treasury Department website.

It took almost 200 years for the national debt to reach $1 trillion – in other words, 1,000 billions. It crossed that point somewhere around late 1981. By 1990, it was $3.2 trillion; by 2000, it was $5.7 trillion; by 2009, $11.9 trillion; and today, it’s $19.9 trillion. That’s more than $61,000 for every American.

So that’s almost 200 years to reach $1 trillion and then 35 years to reach $20 trillion. This is beginning to look like a death spiral.

That’s a discouraging couple of centuries. Then came this year. President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on large tax cuts while barely mentioning spending cuts. He said he wants to spend more on the military, spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, build a wall along the Mexican border, and leave the growing Social Security and Medicare programs alone.

When he comes into office next year, he will be working with a Republican Congress that will want to act quickly to enact some of its long-suppressed priorities while it controls both the executive and legislative branches. They will want to do big things fast while they still can. In 2001, when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, they passed a tax cut and then went on an extended spending spree along with their Democratic counterparts. In 2009, Democrats controlled both the White House and Congress, so they quickly passed their big thing, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

If Republicans want to cut taxes, that’s fine, but that big thing also must be accompanied by another big thing, which is cutting spending by at least an equal amount.

History suggests they won’t do that – that they will focus on the tax cuts and spend more on defense without really cutting spending elsewhere, because Americans like tax cuts and more spending, and elected officials’ jobs depend on being liked.

If tax cuts come first without spending cuts, elected officials will justify it by arguing that the tax cuts will spur so much economic growth that they will pay for the same old spending. And it’s true that tax cuts do spur growth, as does deficit spending. When you have more money, your standard of living improves. It makes no difference, for a time, if that money is borrowed from someone else. But someone eventually has to pay the bill.

So I have this simple request of Arkansas’ congressional delegation: Don’t let history repeat itself. Please, Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton, and Reps. Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman – don’t make the assumption that tax cuts will spur so much growth that corresponding spending cuts can be put off for another time. Have the political will to do both at the same time, and if you don’t possess that will, at least do neither. If your tax cuts more than pay for themselves, then apply the new revenues to paying down the debt, which has not been done since the Eisenhower administration. And if they don’t, then you will have cut taxes and cut spending, which is what you’ve said you wanted to accomplish all along, without adding to the debt.

I make this request on behalf of myself, but also because I have two daughters and eventually expect to have grandchildren too. I’d like to give them an inheritance, not hand them a bill.

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

You know the story about Nero fiddling while Rome burned? It didn’t actually happen, but it illustrates a point about leaders crazily ignoring a problem.

These days, no illustration is needed. The government’s largest programs, Social Security and Medicare, are not burning up, but their problems are being ignored.

On Wednesday, the Social Security trustees and Medicare trustees each released their annual reports.

Social Security’s trustees wrote that the trust fund that supposedly finances the program – but actually has been raided to pay for other programs and then filled with IOUs – will be empty by 2034. That’s when today’s 49-year-olds (I’m 47) reach the normal retirement age. When that happens, benefits for all recipients, including 85-year-olds, theoretically would be cut 21 percent.

But of course that probably wouldn’t happen. The American people wouldn’t stand for it, and too many seniors vote. If tomorrow’s elected officials play the fiddle as well as today’s do (and they will probably be some of the same people), they’ll transfer money from the rest of the budget to Social Security and add to the national debt. As of June 21, that debt is $19,265,744,770,778.65, or more than $59,000 for every American.

Medicare’s due date is approaching faster. The trustees say the trust fund that pays for hospitals will be depleted by 2028, which is two years sooner than was projected last year. When the assets are depleted, revenues would cover 87 percent of the costs. Today, the program covers 55.3 million people.

All of this is occurring in the context of huge budget challenges. The government will already spend $534 billion more this year than it will collect, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Social Security, Medicare and interest on the debt already comprise 45 percent of the federal budget. Social Security and Medicare are growing, and the CBO says interest costs will rise from 6 percent of the budget this year to 13 percent by 2026.

In other words, if you neither touch Social Security and Medicare nor raise taxes, everything else, including defense, has to be cut quite a bit.

The American democratic experiment has faced bigger challenges than this one: creating a Constitution, ending slavery, reconstructing the union, winning World War II. Social Security and Medicare previously have faced insolvency, but at various times policymakers have figured out ways to push the due dates into the future. Social Security doesn’t require some Einsteinian policy fix – just spend less and/or collect more tax revenues. Medicare is harder because it’s based on paying into a health care system that keeps getting more costly, but it can be done.

Still, solving these problems is difficult because of changing demographics – we’re getting older and living longer – and because Americans now expect expensive government services for which they’re unwilling to pay the full cost. They believe the money can be found elsewhere, and some can be found, but not enough.

So elected officials not only must put down their fiddles, but they must also come down into the city and convince a majority of people to help put out a fire that, for now, is hard to see. All the while, they must overcome the many special interests who want to feed the fire.

Somebody must lead. Unfortunately, that probably won’t happen this election year. Sen. Bernie Sanders has led the Democratic Party, including President Obama and Hillary Clinton, to calling for increasing Social Security benefits. Clinton says she’ll pay for her increases by raising taxes on the wealthy – but remember, she gets a lot of money from wealthy people. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, says there will be no need for changing the programs because America will be so rich because of his better trade deals and Mexico-built wall.

If it were up to me, we’d raise Social Security’s retirement age, reduce or end benefits for the wealthy, increase payments to older and infirm recipients, and increase the payroll tax. I’m not sure what to do about Medicare. I’d also cut other things and slowly pay back the money we’ve already spent.

But for now, I’ve lost that debate in every direction. Americans don’t want to cut spending, and they don’t want to raise any taxes.

So at this point, I really don’t care which direction we go. Just stop increasing the debt we’re passing on to my kids. They’re going to have enough on their hands taking care of me someday.

Related: Red ink rising.

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Let’s start this column with two words that sound like they might mean the same thing, but don’t.

“Deficit” and “debt” both refer to when the government spends money it does not have. The big difference is that “deficit” refers to a yearly shortfall, whereas “debt” refers to the government’s accumulated shortfalls. “Deficit” is the money the government added to its credit cards just this year. “Debt” is the money that was already there, plus the new deficit. Add it all together, and the national debt now equals $18.96 trillion, or $58,700 for every American man, woman and child.

Another difference is that sometimes the deficit goes down, but the debt almost never does. In fact, the last time the United States government owed less than it did the year before was 1957 under President Eisenhower.

The one-year credit card additions, on the other hand, have been mostly shrinking since 2009, when the red ink hit $1.4 trillion, or more than $4,600 for every American. That was the year the economy was tanking, the banks were being bailed out, and the United States was still very much involved in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fiscal year 2009 started Oct. 1, 2008, when President George W. Bush was still in office. Under President Obama, yearly deficits stayed above $1 trillion each year until 2013, when the deficit dipped to $680 billion. In 2015, it was $439 billion.

As Obama pointed out in his State of the Union address, deficits have been cut by almost three-fourths since their peak. But with that $439 billon deficit, the government in 2015 still added about $1,400 in debt for every American.

Here’s another way to look at those numbers. As illustrated on the Department of the Treasury’s website, www.treasurydirect.gov, the $1.4 trillion in 2009 was equal to all the debt accumulated over the years from 1790 until 1983 – almost two centuries of combined borrowing. The $439 billion the president bragged about was equal to all the debt accumulated from 1790 until 1972.

That’s better. But no, the state of the union is not strong in this area.

Have I depressed you yet? Here’s the kicker. This brief period of falling deficits is now ending, and the yearly red ink will start rising faster again. On January 19, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the 2016 deficit will increase to $544 billion. From there, yearly deficits will keep expanding so that by 2026, a decade from now, we’ll be back to $1.4 trillion, and that’s assuming Congress doesn’t do anything to make the situation worse, that the United States isn’t in the middle of another recession or war, or that interest rates don’t spike. At that point, the deficit will be 4.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, double what it is today.

This is occurring for several reasons. In December, Congress increased spending for defense and other areas while making permanent numerous tax breaks that were “temporary” but routinely extended every year. Meanwhile, the debt is being driven over the long term by Social Security, government health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and interest payments for the money already owed.

People don’t like to read sentences like that last one. Aside from interest payments, those programs are generally very popular because they are seen as benefitting the needy and/or deserving.

But I’m just telling you where the money goes. The government is increasing spending by $2.7 trillion from 2015 to 2026. Ninety percent of that increase is in those areas.

So that’s where we are: The debt is still increasing, and now, so are the deficits. For the foreseeable future, the government will keep going deeper in debt, and it will do so faster and faster.

There are two types of debt that don’t show up on a balance sheet. One is the debt we owe to our ancestors, who sacrificed much and sometimes everything to build a better life for us. We owe it to them to do the same for our children.

The other debt is to those children. We owe them better than this.

Related columns: Tax-cut-and-spend Congress.