Bring Back a REAL Sequester
A $33 trillion dollar debt and Washington frets over shutdowns.
Balancing the budget is like getting to heaven—most folks know what to do to get there, it’s just that they don’t want do it. That’s probably unfair to the faithfully upright who actually walk the walk, but the analogy is a perfect fit for Washington politicians who put the federal budget over the family budget.
Over the last few years, we have been witness to the greatest fiscal blowout in our nation’s history, much of it due to an orgy of ‘emergency’ pandemic relief spending. When we accumulated the large amounts of debt during WWII, we cut the budget and paid off the war bonds in a peacetime recovery.
Today, the spending is virtually baked-in.
The administration’s post-COVID 2024 budget of $6.9 trillion includes everything from Ukraine funding to student debt forgiveness to the expansion of Medicaid and Obamacare covering 700,000 undocumented ‘dreamers.’1
It’s record deficit, however, isn’t for lack of revenue. Federal receipts are now a $5 trillion dollars annually, up from $3.3 trillion just five years ago.2 Put another way, had spending stayed even close to what it was when I served on the House Budget Committee in 2018, we’d have a massive surplus.
As it stands, Biden’s deficit this year (including the taxpayer bailout of student debt) is approaching $2 trillion.3 At $33 trillion, our gross national debt is quickly outpacing our ability to service it.4 Interest payments on government borrowing are up 30% and heading towards a trillion dollars per year as ten year treasury rates shoot upward.5
Fitch has downgraded U.S. credit ratings.