Congress is about to increase the nation's groaning deficit by 20
percent, an unmistakable signal that cutting government debt has
fallen off the agenda in the nation's capital, according to
Forbes contributor Stan Collender, an expert on
government spending.
Collender, a writer and former staffer on both the House and Senate
budget committees, said current proposals on Capitol Hill are even
worse than if lawmakers took no action at all on balancing the
budget.
"Virtually every policy change that has already or soon will be
considered seriously in the House and Senate will make the deficit
higher rather than lower. In addition, the procedural choices
Congress is making all favor increasing the deficit rather than at
least requiring it not get any worse," he wrote in an article for
Forbes.
In his view, three key priorities — higher military spending, more
domestic spending, and reenacting and making permanent a bevy of
special tax breaks — could easily add $100 billion of additional red
ink.
"The Obama administration made it clear in the budget it released in
February the president would not agree to more military spending
unless Congress also agrees to more for domestic priorities,"
Collender wrote.
In addition, he said a permanent change in the Medicare "sustainable
growth rate" — the so-called "doc fix" — without a complete revenue
increase or offsetting spending cut "is now a very real possibility"
to tack on another $14 billion to the annual deficit.
The anti-deficit groups that received such attention previously
clearly have less political clout or media impact than at any time
in the past 10 years, he asserted.
"There are no prospects for a deficit reduction deal of any kind
this year," Collender asserted.
"There is overwhelming support in Congress and at the White House
for mitigating the impact of sequestration or eliminating it
entirely. This means that that the procedure put in place in 2012 to
keep appropriations from exceeding the annual spending caps and,
therefore, from increasing the deficit is no longer in political
vogue."
Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,
said the nation's deficit is considerably worse than Americans think
it is.
"Under the [budget] estimates used by Congress, we have a huge debt
hole. Under the more comprehensive fiscal gap measurement, we have a
chasm," Haskins wrote in an opinion piece for Brookings.
"We're headed toward a fiscal black hole."
Haskins cited one academic estimate that Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) estimates of less than $13 trillion national is off by a huge
order of magnitude because it does not take into account the
government's full financial obligations for future payments for
Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt.
If those extra obligations were taken into account, the real fiscal
gap could be $210 trillion — more than 16 times larger than the CBO
estimates, he said.
"Of all the failures of recent Congresses and presidents, none is
more important than their failure to deal with the nation's
long-term debt," Haskins wrote.