If your house is on fire, you don’t want the fire department to “make a good start” on putting it out, and then head on home. You want them to extinguish it.
Similarly, when our national debt is $31.4 trillion, cutting back on overspending somewhat, while still spending more than we have, won’t solve the overwhelming problem. We need to move towards a balanced budget.
The debt ceiling deal just passed by Congress, in the end, does not do enough to limit the appetite of President Biden and his radical allies for out-of-control spending. And suspending the debt ceiling until 2025 gives President Biden no limits at all on his urge to borrow money on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer and spend it on whatever his progressive allies want.
Legislation passed since Biden took office has already increased the national debt forecast by $6 trillion for the next 10 years, and his executive actions have increased spending by more than $1 trillion over the same time. And while we already feel inflation daily, at the gas pump and grocery store, his economic policies have also increased the expected interest payments on our debt by $3.6 trillion over ten years.
The recent negotiation promises to cut our deficit spending (spending money we have to borrow) by $1.5 trillion over ten years. But not only are we still deficit spending, we will continue to grow how much we deficit spend each year. We are still adding to what we owe, adding more each year, and not doing anything to pay back what we already owe. This isn’t good enough.
Speaker McCarthy does deserve credit for finally forcing President Biden to negotiate, and to acknowledge (for the first time!) some sort of fiscal restraint. The provisions for speeding up some energy project approvals, adding work requirements for some government assistance programs, and cutting some IRS funding for their proposed 87,000 new agents are solid achievements. But in the end, it’s a good start that won’t go any further, leaving our house on fire.
The Treasury Department was fluid in their estimates of how long the government had until the actual ceiling hit. There was certainly enough time to find a deal that put us on a path towards fiscal responsibilty.
We should have reversed the massive pandemic spending that still bloats our budget programs, and returned our bureaucracy to (at least) 2019 levels. Our current government spending is still about 20% higher than pre-pandemic levels. There are multiple items in the budget that aren’t benefiting the hardworking Americans hardest hit by our current economy. We should have cut recently enacted “green new deal” waste like the $7,500 tax break for electric vehicles (which is available to couples making up to $300,000). We should have cut more of the $80 billion given to the IRS to increase audits on the middle class. We should have undone those Biden Executive Orders and clawed back some of that trillion by restarting student loan payments and reversing his expansion of welfare and Obamacare subsidies.
It was possible to reach a debt reduction deal, not just a debt limit deal. Debt limit deals help politicians. Debt reduction deals help American families.