Rewrite The Rules
No More Baseline Budgets
Posted: December 14, 2012
There was a time, as recently as two years ago — that is, right at the apogee of the Tea Party ascendancy — that Republicans actually talked about financial sense and sensibility. In terms of the national fisc, the John Boehners of this world actually seemed to acknowledge their past mistakes — read, “profligacy” — and, more importantly, seemed to have a clue about how to correct them.
It was in October 2010, a month before the GOP’s “shellacking” of the Democrats in the mid-terms, that Mr. Boehner, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, talked about “start[ing] at Square One” with regard to money and the budget. And what, precisely, was his intent? Doing something about — repealing, gutting, eviscerating, perhaps — the post-Watergate budget “reforms” successfully advanced by Democrats in 1974.
Ushered in at that juncture was a concept of “baseline budgeting” that had no real “baseline” at all. A “baseline,” in our view, suggests permanence, an established starting point. Not so, under this approach.
You see, before anyone or any entity submits a budget or takes a vote, federal spending automatically increases. As such, any recommendation to spend less than the annual rate of increase is deemed a “cut” — even if spending, in real dollars, has risen. This serves to explain how President Obama can repeatedly maintain he has “cut” spending — even as expenditures skyrocket and deficits balloon beyond the trillion-dollar mark.
So, in many respects, we’ve been living a lie, and both parties are to blame — the Democrats for institutionalizing this approach and Republicans, their increasingly infrequent objections and qualms of conscience aside, for acquiescing to it.
If America is ever to gets its spending addiction under some semblance of control, our leaders must turn off the automatic pilot and reintroduce sanity to the budgeting process. At present, that’s not happening — in fact, far from it — as Republicans engaged in the “fiscal cliff” deliberations continue to negotiate, as The Wall Street Journal has observed, “off the phony baseline.” What good is that?
We see Mr. Obama aggressively pushing his own agenda in these dead-end discussions — tax-rate hikes, heightened spending, full executive control over the debt ceiling, and nary a true mention of entitlement reform. Republicans should do likewise, and their “baseline” should be genuine budgetary reform.
It was in October 2010, a month before the GOP’s “shellacking” of the Democrats in the mid-terms, that Mr. Boehner, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, talked about “start[ing] at Square One” with regard to money and the budget. And what, precisely, was his intent? Doing something about — repealing, gutting, eviscerating, perhaps — the post-Watergate budget “reforms” successfully advanced by Democrats in 1974.
Ushered in at that juncture was a concept of “baseline budgeting” that had no real “baseline” at all. A “baseline,” in our view, suggests permanence, an established starting point. Not so, under this approach.
You see, before anyone or any entity submits a budget or takes a vote, federal spending automatically increases. As such, any recommendation to spend less than the annual rate of increase is deemed a “cut” — even if spending, in real dollars, has risen. This serves to explain how President Obama can repeatedly maintain he has “cut” spending — even as expenditures skyrocket and deficits balloon beyond the trillion-dollar mark.
So, in many respects, we’ve been living a lie, and both parties are to blame — the Democrats for institutionalizing this approach and Republicans, their increasingly infrequent objections and qualms of conscience aside, for acquiescing to it.
If America is ever to gets its spending addiction under some semblance of control, our leaders must turn off the automatic pilot and reintroduce sanity to the budgeting process. At present, that’s not happening — in fact, far from it — as Republicans engaged in the “fiscal cliff” deliberations continue to negotiate, as The Wall Street Journal has observed, “off the phony baseline.” What good is that?
We see Mr. Obama aggressively pushing his own agenda in these dead-end discussions — tax-rate hikes, heightened spending, full executive control over the debt ceiling, and nary a true mention of entitlement reform. Republicans should do likewise, and their “baseline” should be genuine budgetary reform.