Age Of Austerity? House And Senate Lawmakers Proposed $1 Trillion New Spending Last Year - Investors.com
Despite endless talk of spending cuts and fiscal restraint in Washington over the past year, lawmakers continued to act as though the government doesn't spend nearly enough.
They introduced 874 bills in the House and Senate that would have boosted annual federal spending by more than $1 trillion if they'd all been signed into law, according to an analysis done for IBD by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.
In contrast, lawmakers offered up just 215 bills to cut spending last year that would have reduced federal outlays by about half a trillion had they all been signed into law.
The analysis also found that for every dollar in cuts, lawmakers in the House proposed nearly $3 in spending hikes, and in the Senate $1.40 in hikes.
"Even at a time of massive deficits, Congress is still mostly occupied with pushing ideas to expand government spending," said Demian Brady, senior policy analyst at the NTUF, which has been tracking spending bills for more than 20 years through its BillTally project.
Brady notes that a big chunk of the spending tab comes from proposals by liberals in Congress that would transform the nation's health care into an entirely government-run "single payer" system. Absent those single-payer bills, the net effect of all the legislation introduced would be close to a wash.
The analysis also found a shift, at least, toward more spending cuts. "We are seeing more and bigger cut bills," said Brady, "and a smaller ratio of increase to cut bills than in last Congress."
That could change, however, should Democrats succeed in winning back control of the House in November.
The NTUF analysis found that congressional Democrats are by far the biggest spenders. Last year, 692 spending-hike bills had either all or majority Democratic sponsorship. Republicans, in contrast, sponsored just 126 such bills.
At the other end of the spectrum, GOP lawmakers introduced 172 bills that would have cut federal spending, compared with just 33 such bills offered up by Democrats.
Even if few of these bills were likely to make it all the way to the president's desk, they are a sign of the ongoing pressure in Congress to boost spending, budget experts say, since there is far more time and energy spent on proposals to expand government than to shrink it.
It's one reason budget caps have typically failed to hold in the past, and why proposed spending cuts often fail to materialize, these experts note.
For example, presidents routinely offer up dozens if not hundreds of programs they think should get the axe — President Clinton's 1995 budget had 115 of them — but few ever got acted upon and many show up on target lists year after year.
And in the past 50 years, annual inflation-adjusted spending on domestic programs — education, transportation, the environment, etc. — has declined just six times; and five of those years occurred during the Reagan administration.
As a result, spending on these programs as a share of GDP has climbed by more than 26% since 1962. That doesn't include spending on entitlement programs, which has seen its share of the economy nearly triple over those years.
Defense spending, in contrast, is not nearly as immune to spending cuts — the Pentagon's annual budget was cut in 19 of the past 50 years. And even with the recent buildup, defense spending as a share of the economy is about half what it was in 1962.
When President Obama introduced his budget last year, he made it clear that spending cuts were a critical part of getting federal deficits under control.
"All of us agree," he said referring to Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, "that we have to cut spending, and all of us agree that we have to get our deficits under control and our debt under control."
But unless that message sinks in on Capitol Hill, it's not clear that real, deep spending cuts will ever actually materialize.
http://news.investors.com/Article.aspx?id=597873&ibdbot=1&p=2
They introduced 874 bills in the House and Senate that would have boosted annual federal spending by more than $1 trillion if they'd all been signed into law, according to an analysis done for IBD by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.
In contrast, lawmakers offered up just 215 bills to cut spending last year that would have reduced federal outlays by about half a trillion had they all been signed into law.
The analysis also found that for every dollar in cuts, lawmakers in the House proposed nearly $3 in spending hikes, and in the Senate $1.40 in hikes.
"Even at a time of massive deficits, Congress is still mostly occupied with pushing ideas to expand government spending," said Demian Brady, senior policy analyst at the NTUF, which has been tracking spending bills for more than 20 years through its BillTally project.
Brady notes that a big chunk of the spending tab comes from proposals by liberals in Congress that would transform the nation's health care into an entirely government-run "single payer" system. Absent those single-payer bills, the net effect of all the legislation introduced would be close to a wash.
The analysis also found a shift, at least, toward more spending cuts. "We are seeing more and bigger cut bills," said Brady, "and a smaller ratio of increase to cut bills than in last Congress."
That could change, however, should Democrats succeed in winning back control of the House in November.
The NTUF analysis found that congressional Democrats are by far the biggest spenders. Last year, 692 spending-hike bills had either all or majority Democratic sponsorship. Republicans, in contrast, sponsored just 126 such bills.
At the other end of the spectrum, GOP lawmakers introduced 172 bills that would have cut federal spending, compared with just 33 such bills offered up by Democrats.
Even if few of these bills were likely to make it all the way to the president's desk, they are a sign of the ongoing pressure in Congress to boost spending, budget experts say, since there is far more time and energy spent on proposals to expand government than to shrink it.
It's one reason budget caps have typically failed to hold in the past, and why proposed spending cuts often fail to materialize, these experts note.
For example, presidents routinely offer up dozens if not hundreds of programs they think should get the axe — President Clinton's 1995 budget had 115 of them — but few ever got acted upon and many show up on target lists year after year.
And in the past 50 years, annual inflation-adjusted spending on domestic programs — education, transportation, the environment, etc. — has declined just six times; and five of those years occurred during the Reagan administration.
As a result, spending on these programs as a share of GDP has climbed by more than 26% since 1962. That doesn't include spending on entitlement programs, which has seen its share of the economy nearly triple over those years.
Defense spending, in contrast, is not nearly as immune to spending cuts — the Pentagon's annual budget was cut in 19 of the past 50 years. And even with the recent buildup, defense spending as a share of the economy is about half what it was in 1962.
When President Obama introduced his budget last year, he made it clear that spending cuts were a critical part of getting federal deficits under control.
"All of us agree," he said referring to Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, "that we have to cut spending, and all of us agree that we have to get our deficits under control and our debt under control."
But unless that message sinks in on Capitol Hill, it's not clear that real, deep spending cuts will ever actually materialize.
http://news.investors.com/Article.aspx?id=597873&ibdbot=1&p=2
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