Pay as you go?
The WSJ discusses the current resuscitation of the concept of “pay as you go” and finds that it has heard this all before:
Some things in politics you can’t make up, such as President Obama’s re-re-endorsement Tuesday of “pay-as-you-go” budgeting. Coming after $787 billion in nonstimulating stimulus, a $410 billion omnibus to wrap up fiscal 2009, a $3.5 trillion 2010 budget proposal, sundry bailouts and a 13-figure health-care spending expansion still to come, this latest vow of fiscal chastity is like Donald Trump denouncing self-promotion. Check that. Even The Donald would find this one too much to sell.
But Mr. Obama must think the press and public are dumb enough to buy it, because there he was Tuesday re-selling the same “paygo” promises that Democrats roll out every election. Paygo is “very simple,” the President claimed. “Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere.”
That’s what Democrats also promised in 2006, with Nancy Pelosi vowing that “the first thing” House Democrats would do if they took Congress was reimpose paygo rules that “Republicans had let lapse.” By 2008, Speaker Pelosi had let those rules lapse no fewer than 12 times, to make way for $400 billion in deficit spending. Mr. Obama repeated the paygo pledge during his 2008 campaign, and instead we have witnessed the greatest peacetime spending binge in U.S. history. As a share of GDP, spending will hit an astonishing 28.5% in fiscal 2009, with the deficit hitting 13% and projected to stay at 4% to 5% for years to come.
Pay as you go? There’s been no payment so far for this tragedy. But the bill will very likely be coming due shortly, and perhaps we’ll discover that even many Democrats object to having their pockets picked by the dissembling elites in Washington.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I wish America’s politicians would read “The Power of Small” ( http://tinyurl.com/cmdxg6 ). Smaller is definitely better, certainly when it comes to the budget, especially when the country is already drowning in debt. “Pay as you go” is a decent idea, although it’s a little arbitrary in its assumption that there is a correct budgetary level, and it should neither exceed nor go below that. Of course, as you point out, good ideas are often invoked and then ignored by those in charge of spending tax dollars. Pay as you go would be better than what we have now, which is ever-increasing spending, but what we really need is less spending and more saving.