The Truth in Budgeting Law

The Super Committee that grew out of the debt ceiling compromise is meeting in earnest in Washington. That group has until Thanksgiving to propose at least one and a half trillion dollars in savings in the federal budget or all sorts of unsavory and unacceptable cuts will go into place. There are a myriad of suggestions as to what the committee should do. Supposedly president Obama will put forth his plan this week. But I have a very simple suggestion: put forth the Truth in Budgeting Law. All it would require is that from now on, all budgets moving into the future would remain at the level of the preceding year unless Congress votes to raise expenditures. In other words, if the 2011 spending appropriated to a federal department is 24 billion dollars, the budget for the next year would remain at that level unless Congress voted to change it.

Most people in the country would assume that the budgeting method I just described is what is done in Washington right now, but they would be wrong. A few decades ago, Congress decreed that there would be a federal baseline budget. That baseline budget has increases built in to every expenditure of about 7% each year. In other words, that same federal department that got 24 billion dollars in 2011 will get 7% more or an extra 1.7 billon dollars in 2012, and that will not be considered an increase. Indeed, if the department gets the same 24 billion dollars, in Washington it is considered to be a 7% cut.

The baseline budgeting scam was put in supposedly to take care of inflation. In truth, the budgeting scam actually was meant to take the pressure off of congressmen and senators to justify continual increases in federal spending. After all, if there is a built in 7% increase and you keep the actual increase to 6.5%, you can be a "budget cutter". Aternatively, if you increase spending by 9% year over year, you can tell your constituents with a straight face that you only raised spending by a tiny 2%. So long as the secret of baseline budgeting did not get out, Congress had the ability to spend while looking like it was not.

The time has come for Congress to take back responsibility for its own spending habits. Changing the baseline budget system to one that stays level year after year amounts to a "budget cut" of about 9 trillion dollars over ten years. Nobody's taxes have to go up. No programs have to be eliminated. All that happens is that the dishonest budgeting system is replaced with the actual truth with regard to spending.

The super committee ought to remember this: The Truth will set you free.