Restoring Honesty to the Federal Budget

I am sure that there are many of you who just read the title to this post and smiled or even laughed. "How naive," you must say. How could anyone imagine using honesty and the federal budget in the same sentence?

Well, here's the problem. It starts with a question: In the current fiscal year, the federal government will spend about 3.5 trillion dollars. If Congress never passes a new budget but instead passes a continuing resolution to keep spending at "current levels", how much will the federal government spend next year? For those of you who said that next year's spending will be the same as this year's since Congress just extended the "current levels", think again. The correct answer is that for next year, federal spending automatically goes up by about 7% and that higher level is considered an extension of "current levels".

Let's take this point to its logical conclusion. Over the next decade, federal spending will just about double even though it will be said to be the same as current levels in 2012. All of this is the result of the baseline budgeting scheme passed by Congress a long time ago. The original justification for the automatic increases was inflation, but that has changed. Now, the automatic increases allow the Democrats to spend ever larger amounts without having to explain any reason for the increase. Indeed, this is why Democrats stopped actually passing budgets and appropriations bills for the various departments when Obama became president. Spending goes up just with the continuing resolutions and the extra "emergency" spending.

So what would happen were Congress to go back to budgets that did not automatically increase? The answer is staggering. Were Congress to get rid of this baseline budgeting scam, it would be scored by the Congressional Budget Office as a $7 trillion cut over the next decade. That's right, the Super Committee was struggling to find $1.2 in cuts during the same period, but just changing the budgeting method results in seven trillion in cuts.

This disease of baseline budgeting infects the whole federal government. If Congress passes a law setting aside half a billion dollars to help veterans reintegrate after leaving the service, in ten years, that amount will be about a billion dollars for the year. That will be the case even if ten years from now, we have no veterans leaving the service after fighting in a war. In the interim, if the Democrats are able to keep Congress just passing continuing resolutions, no one will have looked at this program to see if it is past the need for it. The money will just keep flowing.

This may seem like a technical issue, but it lies at the heart of much of the deficit problem in the USA. If it is properly explained to the American people, it will cause an earthquake of outrage. Congress and the President are supposed to govern, not just move forward on autopilot.