February 03, 2010

Our Views: Speed bump on spending

By Editorial  |  2TheAdvocate.com  |  Link to article

First the bad news, $14.294 trillion worth.

That’s the federal debt ceiling, the amount of debt the U.S. government is authorized to incur. The debts that every man, woman and child in the United States will one day have to pay off.

Now the good news: Maybe it’s not much right now, but Democrats in the U.S. Senate approved one significant step toward curbing the debt in the future.

It’s called “pay as you go” budgeting, or pay-go for short. If the government wants to spend more on one program, it has to find off-setting cuts in another, or raise the revenue to pay for it.

Not the same thing as cutting up the credit card in the government’s wallet. But when one at least has to look in the wallet for cash, there’s an automatic level of restraint that is built into the process.

We have long supported pay-go rules, and believe those rules were in part responsible for the budget surpluses that developed in the Clinton years.

The rule went by the wayside after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent war spending. Maybe that was a reasonable enough decision in the short-term, but over the years the bloated budget deficits under President George W. Bush helped to give the country a debt load that is the envy of free-spending European socialists.

Sadly, some Republicans have long opposed pay-go, even as they trumpet their devotion to balanced budgets; no Republican senator backed pay-go this year, including Louisiana’s U.S. Sen. David Vitter. That vote makes the perfect the enemy of the good.

The argument is that pay-go doesn’t forbid tax increases. True, but it’s difficult to pass taxes, too.

Pay-go doesn’t cut spending, but it is a helpful speed bump.

For that reason, it is not always popular with Democratic liberals, but conservative Democrats in the House — the “Blue Dogs,” including U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville — insisted that it be part of the deal for raising the debt ceiling.

Melancon is challenging Vitter this fall, and we suspect we’ll hear more about this on the campaign trail. In the category of who’s really more conservative, a vote against pay-go rules puts the incumbent on the wrong side of the debate about the federal debt.