INTRANSIGENT SPENDAHOLICS

When Moody’s, the bond rating agency, threatened to downgrade the credit worthiness of the U.S. government if the ceiling on the national debt isn’t raised by Aug. 2, the threat was reported on the evening news on CBS and NBC, and on the front pages of many newspapers.

But journalists paid little attention when Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s said they would downgrade U.S. bonds if federal spending isn’t cut by $4 trillion over the next ten years.

If our credit rating is downgraded, the Treasury department will have to pay a higher rate of interest to sell its bonds, ballooning the deficit.  Americans will have to pay more for home and auto loans, since the interest rates on them is tied to what Treasury pays.

Raising the debt ceiling would permit Treasury to borrow more money, thus avoiding default in the short term.  But borrowing more makes the risk of default greater in the long run.

The long run isn’t very far off.  Standard & Poor’s said Monday (7/18) it will downgrade U.S. Treasuries in 90 days if a deal to cut $4 trillion from the budget isn’t made by then.

Here’s why Standard & Poor’s is worried.  In 2001, the national debt was $5.95 trillion.  It’s $14.34 trillion now, a 141% increase in just ten years.

When debt exceeds 90% of GDP, economic growth is reduced one to two percentage points, concluded economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart.  A single percentage point decline means a loss of one million jobs, says the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Debt is now about 95% of GDP, and going higher.  The Treasury Department announced last week the budget deficit for this fiscal year will be larger than last year’s $1.29 trillion.

So you’d think Mr. Obama would be as worried as are the bond rating agencies, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

Mr. Obama presented in January a budget the Congressional Budget Office estimated would add $9.5 trillion over ten years to our current $13.4 trillion national debt.  It was so frivolous not a single Democrat in the Senate voted for it.

In a speech at George Washington University April 13, the president said he’d revised his budget to reduce spending by $4 trillion over 12 years.  But he provided no details. 

Journalists have reported as fact Mr. Obama’s claim he offered $1.7 trillion in spending cuts during closed door negotiations with Republicans, but, again, the president has provided no details.

The president isn’t alone in fiscal delinquency.  Senate Democrats haven’t presented a budget in more than two years, even though the law requires the majority party to do so each year.

House Republicans passed again Tuesday (7/19) a detailed spending plan to trim nearly $6 trillion from the budget Mr. Obama submitted in January.  Senate Democrats voted it down (51-46) today (7/22).

He’d have vetoed the GOP’s "cut, cap and balance" plan if it did get to his desk, the president said.  He wants a "more balanced" plan that includes tax increases.  Roughly $1.75 trillion in new taxes already are scheduled to kick in 2013, but Mr. Obama didn’t mention them.

The problem is spending. Outlays rose from $1.863 trillion in FY 2001 to $3.819 trillion (est) in this fiscal year, 105% in ten years.  The federal government now consumes a whopping 24% of the gross domestic product.  (Since 1903, federal spending has averaged a hair over 20% of GDP).

Another way to indicate the problem is spending — specifically, Mr. Obama’s spending — is to note that if federal spending were held to what it was during President Bush’s last year in office, deficits would be eliminated in four years.

Since World War II, federal tax revenues have averaged 18% of GDP.  Income tax rates varied widely during this period, and there were both booms and busts. But revenues never exceeded 20.6 % of GDP.  That seems to be a ceiling — no matter what economic conditions are or how high rates are raised — and it suggests the budget cannot be balanced unless spending is held below 20% of GDP.

So tax hikes can’t close the budget gap.  But they could clobber the moribund recovery, making the deficit worse.

Democrats want Republicans to accept real tax hikes in exchange for mostly phantom spending cuts. Rep. Allen West of Florida calls them "fairy dust" cuts.  The code word journalists use to describe Republicans for opposing more taxes is "intransigent." 

But the truly intransigent are those who want to go on spending as if there were no problem.  We could call the Intransigent Spendaholics.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.