This OpEd by Gretchen Hamel, executive director of Public Notice, ran in the Colorado Gazette on May 19, 2010.
“If you can’t budget, you can’t govern.” That’s what now Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt said in 2006, when criticizing the majority for failing to pass a budget resolution. Now the responsibility is his and the quote is coming back to haunt him. Congress failed to produce a budget this year, in spite of the official deadline having passed more than a month ago.
Unfortunately, Chairman’s Spratt’s quote was off the mark. The political class can govern, in spite of not being able to budget – it just can’t govern well. And without a budget, it certainly can’t govern responsibly.
What’s worse, they wonder, producing a budget exposing and calling attention to trillion dollar deficits or producing no budget at all? Undoubtedly, polls have been taken, and the political wizards must be leaning toward the conclusion that it’s better to jettison the whole process than to put on paper how irresponsible Congress intends to be with taxpayers’ money.
The worst news in this is that those political soothsayers may be right. Where is the outrage that Congress failed to pass a budget last month?
On April 15th, millions of Americans rushed to file their taxes. Citizens had no choice but to wade through the needlessly complicated tax forms, collect their papers detailing exactly how much income they earned, and do the math to make sure that they didn’t deny Uncle Sam a dime. As a citizen, failure to file taxes comes with consequences from the IRS.
Congress faced its own deadline that day: they are required to complete their budget resolution by April 15th. Yet no Member was rushing to comply with that law. The media yawned at this dereliction of duty, a few taking the time to speculate in back-page stories about the role budget politics will play in the political horse race.
Just this week, the Treasury Department announced that the deficit for April was over $80 billion – the highest on record for that month. This was the 19th straight month the federal government was in the red – the longest streak on record.
The American people should be outraged. They need to be outraged because unless Members of Congress feel that they face penalty—most notably the loss of their seats—Washington will never cease its overspending, and the American people will pay the price.
Today, each American family’s share of the national debt is $115,000. That’s 70 percent higher than it was just 10 years ago. And over the next ten years, that burden is expected to go up by nearly 70 percent. How are we going to pay this off?
While Washington contemplates that question, taxpayers will face the burden of just servicing the debt. This year, the federal government has to collect $188 billion to make interest payments. In ten years, interest will require four times as much. While interest payments grow, so will the costs of other government programs like Social Security and Medicare. In just ten years, interest and our national entitlement programs will consume 90 percent of the federal budget.
That’s not the worst of it. Together our entitlement programs and other spending commitments have unfunded liabilities of $106 trillion, an almost incomprehensible sum. Consider this: to come up with $106 trillion, the United States would have to sell every house in the country five times, or collect all of the income from every American nine times. This is not a partisan problem; it’s an American problem.
Our lawmakers know this. They know that Washington has dug America deep into debt. They know that economic disaster looms, not decades in the future, but just a few years down the road.
And what are they doing about it? They are waiting for recommendations from a blue ribbon commission designed to prevent lawmakers from having to make tough choices and to pave the way for tax increases.
That’s not leadership. That’s an outrage.
Producing a budget wouldn’t change our fiscal predicament. But it would force members to take responsibility for the crisis they are creating.
The American people need to speak up. They need to tell their Representatives to do their jobs and create a budget for our government. Insist that the budget includes real spending cuts and does not add more to our national debt. If current members are not willing to govern responsibly, they will learn in November that their constituents won’t stand by while they bankrupt America.
Gretchen Hamel is the executive director of Public Notice, a new independent, bipartisan, non-profit organization dedicated to providing facts and insights on the effect public policy has on Americans’ financial well being. For more information please visit www.thepublicnotice.org.
