Delegating Powers to the Vice President in the Mubarek Administration

OK, that does not roll off the tongue as nice­ly as rear­rang­ing deck chairs on the Titan­ic. But either metaphor serves in the case of our elect­ed fed­er­al offi­cials and the deficit.

Let us begin with an old chart from the Con­gres­sion­al Bud­get Office via our, ahem, good friend Ross Perot:

This chart is a bit dat­ed, but the curves have not changed much. Future deficits are the result of medicare/​medicaid and inter­est. The last being the same as say­ing future deficits are the result of future deficits. If future deficits can be brought under con­trol, then the inter­est pay­ments will take care of themselves.

Want some­thing more recent?

This is from Feb­ru­ary 25^th, 2011. It assumes that the Bush tax cuts will expire and that the Oba­ma stim­u­lus tax cuts also expire. Note that the growth of health spend­ing goes from over eight per­cent of GDP to 12% of GDP while the total deficit at that point is 3.2 per­cent of GDP. So the entire pro­ject­ed deficit in 2021 could be attrib­uted to the growth of med­ical spending.

The Afford­able Care Act (Oba­macare) actu­al­ly includes sev­er­al mea­sures intend­ed to bring down med­ical costs. The CBO grades the Act as low­er­ing the deficit even though they did not take many of the cost sav­ing mea­sures into con­sid­er­a­tion on the grounds that the mea­sures had not yet shown they would work (they were not even law at the time…).

So the only seri­ous deficit reduc­tion effort in Wash­ing­ton today is the Democ­rats defense of health reform. Oba­ma freez­ing spend­ing and the Repub­li­cans talk of cut­ting spend­ing amounts to noth­ing more that del­e­gat­ing pow­ers to the vice pres­i­dent in the Mubarek administration.

Oh yes. If you want to clear up the short term deficits, this chart might prove useful:

For good or for ill, the spend­ing that the Repub­li­cans want to cut is there for a rea­son. Peo­ple like it. That spend­ing is pop­u­lar. War, the Bush tax cuts, and the reces­sion dri­ve the short term deficit.

Even if the wars end tomor­row, the sav­ings there will be min­i­mal. Some­thing else will come along. It always does.

Many of the cuts the Repub­li­cans pro­pose would actu­al­ly weak­en the eco­nom­ic recov­ery and so increase the deficit.

The Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire. All of them.