Breakout in the Budget Conference
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan was right last week to predict the budget conference would not succeed by trying to reach a “grand bargain.”
“If we focus on some big, grand bargain then we’re going to focus on our differences, and both sides are going to require that the other side compromises some core principle and then we’ll get nothing done,” Ryan told the Washington Post. “So we aren’t focusing on a grand bargain because I don’t think in this divided government you’ll get one.”
The double-pain strategy that would be at the heart of any grand bargain--tax hikes and entitlement cuts--wouldn’t just be difficult to pass in the current Congress. It would also be a dead loser for the American people. Asking the public to bear the pain of austerity so that Washington doesn’t have to is no way to deal with overspending and bureaucratic bloat.
Looking for small places the two parties can agree, as Chairman Ryan recommended, is the best viable way forward. And practically anywhere in the federal government the conference committee looks, it will find lots of significant “small” bipartisan opportunities that could add up to a “big” deal.
Take a few examples which both sides should be able to agree on:
- Medicare and Medicaid currently
tolerate fraud of approximately $70 to $120 billion a year. That is
roughly $1 trillion over ten years paid to crooks. These are not
small time crooks. Many of them are churning out dozens, even
hundreds, of fraudulent claims each day. A modern, computer-based
system should be able to catch them as a matter of routine. Visa,
Mastercard, and American Express do this so well that they sometimes
flag even legitimate transactions for extra attention. We should
insist Medicare and Medicaid meet the same standard.
- Approximately 25 percent of all
Earned Income Tax Credit payments are improper. That is $132 billion
over the last ten years. Plugging this hole should be an easy
bipartisan decision worth tens of billions of dollars.
- In 2012 alone, the Government
Accountability Office reported $108 billion in improper payments.
And 2012 was a typical year. While not all of this money is waste,
it suggests the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars in
a decade that it simply never should have spent.
- Senator Tom Coburn and his staff
have compiled more than three dozen reports that detail absurd
levels of waste and mismanagement. Last year, for instance, he
identified more than
$70 billion that is sitting unspent years after it was
appropriated due mostly to the incompetence of Congress or of the
bureaucracy. If the budget conference committed to fixing even half
of the ridiculous waste he has cataloged, it would be worth hundreds
of billions of dollars
- A study by the IBM Center for
Business of Government concluded that if the federal government
managed its operations to the same standard as a modern
multinational corporation, it would save $100 billion a year--or a
trillion in ten.
- Moving from Medicare’s current “Fee for Service” model to an “Administrative Services Only” model similar to the coverage many privately-insured Americans have today would save roughly half a trillion dollars over ten years, according to UnitedHealth Group's Center for Health Reform and Modernization.
We must break out of the two obsolete mindsets that dominate Washington today--acceptance of a “new normal” on the left, and commitment to austerity on the right--to create a much better future for the American people.
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