Conservatives’ Struggle To Cut Spending Highlights Urgency of Taming Unsustainable National Debt

Conservatives’ painful, frustrating efforts to cut spending highlight how vital it is to return to a balanced budget. The American people overwhelmingly want a balanced budget. When America’s New Majority Project asked about a balanced budget amendment, it attracted a 70 percent majority. Only 13 percent of people opposed the idea. This was an amazingly wide majority, with 67 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of Independents, and 74 percent of Republicans favoring a balanced budget amendment. Interestingly, support came from every demographic group, including 66 percent of African Americans and 62 percent of Latinos. Importantly, support for a balanced budget is not support for tax increases — as many Washington insiders assert. A full 58 percent of Americans said they believed eliminating waste and corruption would allow us to balance the budget without increasing taxes. In a poll for the Club for Growth, Americans favored eliminating wasteful spending and balancing the budget before taxes were raised again by an enormous 81 percent to 12 percent margin. We already have the formula for success. We used it in the 1990s to balance the budget for four consecutive years (the only time in the last century). It requires controlling spending, reforming welfare, and promoting economic growth through tax and regulation cuts. By the way, 71 percent of Americans support this plan.Fiscal conservatives should hammer away on the absurd debt payments on our $36 trillion debt. The payments will continue to balloon with current spending patterns. We will soon pay more toward interest on the national debt than we do for our national defense (and we have the most expensive national defense system in the world). The American people understand that this is insane and unsustainable. Conservatives just need to pick the right fight. Pitting balancing the budget against continued spending is a winner. Trying to cut spending without the goal of balancing the budget is a loser.This is because cutting spending in a world that accepts deficits is difficult. Each interest group looks at the ocean of government money and thinks, “Why not me, too?”Furthermore, those who want taxpayers’ money hire lobbyists. They form trade associations. They focus donations on members of congressional committees that give them money. The outside interest groups usually have allies within the bureaucracy who testify that they need more money. The liberal news media always has a pro-spending, pro-interest group bias. Each potential spending cut is portrayed in the worst possible light — parks will be closed, children will go hungry, diseases will be untreated, America will collapse, etc. It is as though editors and producers instinctively reach for the worst outcomes. They highlight maximum pain — and zero benefit — in every news story about spending cuts.The lobbyists and much of the news media are protecting the old order from innovation, change, and cost cutting.Senator Gramm pointed out four decades ago that the people who want money are at least nine times more intense than those who want to cut spending. A spending cut is inherently of general interest to conservative lawmakers who want to right our fiscal ship. But the people who want the money are hyper-focused, energized, and determined. Those who know the current spending pattern is hopelessly unsustainable are frustrated. Their interest in the general good is drowned by the wave of special interests. Gimmicks also do not work. Selling federal assets will not change the long-term pattern. Raising taxes will hurt the long-term pattern, because they will slow the economy and reduce future revenue. As Victor Davis Hanson has said, the only long-term solution to our growing debt crisis is to cut spending. Mr. Hanson is right, but the current pattern of short-term focus on individual pieces of legislation simply does not work.No matter how intense, tough, and willing to fight hardcore conservatives become, they do not have the votes in the House or the Senate to force serious spending cuts. They can make a lot of noise and delay major bills. They can briefly be the focus of media attention. But they do not currently have the numbers to sustain a serious spending cut campaign. The challenge for Republicans is to think bigger, not smaller. This is an old Dwight Eisenhower rule for solving problems. This means insisting on a path to a balanced budget that justifies deep reforms and substantial long-term spending reductions.If the fight is balancing the budget versus continuing huge deficits and unsustainable interest payments, the pro-balanced budget forces will rally the American people. If the fight is one more specific spending cut versus continued deficits, the big spending insiders and their lobbyists will win.So, those who want to cut spending must win the right argument first. It’s a simple one: The current pattern is unaffordable, and we have no choice but to move to a balanced budget.This will rally the American people so they put pressure on their members of the House and Senate to bring spending under control, balance the budget, and start paying down the gigantic debt.The bigger moral principle of the balanced budget will defeat the immediate self-serving greed of the interest groups.This is the only path forward for serious conservatives.

Conservatives’ Struggle To Cut Spending Highlights Urgency of Taming Unsustainable National Debt

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