Soccer Dad

No check, no balances, no oversight

Robert Samuelson sums up the CBO's estimates:

For the past half-century, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP, federal taxes about 18 percent of GDP and the budget deficit 2 percent of GDP. The CBO's projection for 2020 -- which assumes the economy has returned to "full employment" -- puts spending at 26 percent of GDP, taxes at a bit less than 19 percent of GDP and a deficit above 7 percent of GDP. Future spending and deficit figures continue to grow.

What this means is that balancing the budget in 2020 would require a tax increase of almost 50 percent from the last half-century's average. Remember, that average was 18 percent of GDP. To get from there to 26 percent of GDP (spending in 2020) would require an additional 8 percentage points. In today's dollars, that would be about $1.1 trillion, a 44 percent annual tax increase. Even these figures may be optimistic, because CBO's projections for defense and "nondefense discretionary" spending may be unrealistically low. This last category covers much of what government does: environmental regulation, aid to education, highway construction, law enforcement, homeland security.

While Samuelson has criticisms of both Democrats and Republicans, his column is a criticism of the President's proposed expansion of government. This might be why Jeff Jacoby observes about healthcare reform:

Hoyer conceded that if lawmakers had to carefully study the bill ahead of time, they would never vote for it. "If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn't read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,'' he said. The majority leader was declaring, in other words, that it is more important for Congress to pass the bill than to understand it.

Which leads Instapundit to conclude:

This sort of behavior -- passing bills that no one has read -- or, that in the case of the healthcare "bill" haven't even actually been written -- represents political corruption of the first order.

Samuelson writes about hwo the electorate wants more benefits for less taxes. But a lot of this brought about the failure of the political class to observe checks and balances. But it also a failure of the media to provide oversight to the proceedings. The constant media drumbeat for politicians to "do something" and politicans' desire for media approval creates a model of dysfunction, where success is defined by "doing something" regardless of the very real costs in the present or to ward off some hypothetical but exorbitant cost in the future.