Reforms Needed to Clean-up Federal ‘Stimulus’
The National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF) has released a new Issue Brief, prepared by Senior Policy Analyst Demian Brady, which “argues that two budget reform ideas from the past may hold the key to a less debt-ridden future for America.” As the NTUF press release (with link to Issue Brief 160) notes:
“A year after its enactment, the $862 billion "stimulus" package seems to have created more worries about deficit financing than it has created jobs, but what can policymakers do to clean up the mess?”
Brady explains the “bias towards spending” in Congress, with this historical information:
“In 1994, David Keating, who was then the Executive Vice President for the National Taxpayers Union, spoke before the House of Representatives' "A to Z Spending Cuts Plan" Conference and said that the proposal should be at the top of the fiscal policy agenda, given the "unacceptable levels" of the national debt and the annual budget deficit. At the time, the deficit stood at $228 billion (in constant dollars) and amounted to 2.9 percent of GDP. The national debt was $4.5 trillion. If those levels were "unacceptable," the current situation would seem to defy any superlative: The federal deficit for FY 2010 is estimated to climb to $1.5 trillion ($1.2 trillion in constant dollars), or approximately 10.5 percent of GDP. And, over the intervening 16 years, the debt has grown to over $12.3 trillion.”
He charts how budget restraint has declined over the past 15 years, writing:
“Using research from NTUF's BillTally system, Brady charted a 15-year decline in ideas for budgetary restraint in Congress. He found that at the end of the 104th Congress, 296 Representatives and Senators had legislative agendas whose net overall effect would have reduced federal outlays; at the same time, lawmakers introduced roughly two bills to raise spending for every bill to cut it. By the end of the 110th Congress (2008), there were only 21 "net cutters" in Congress and the ratio of spending-hike to spending-cut bills stood at 30 to 1.”
Brady outlines two reforms that have proved effective in the past, before providing a list of “26 spending reduction candidates (out of thousands NTUF and others have identified) that could begin the debate, such as: repealing the remaining stimulus funds ($514.8 billion), ending TARP immediately ($150 billion), and eliminating the redundancy of the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Environmental Quality ($3 million).”
As we growled last Friday, Congress doesn’t need a fiscal commission to bring sanity to federal spending. Rather political leaders with principle and a bit of vision are needed to implement procedures such as Brady describes in the Issue Brief.