The changes announced in the Pentagon’s new budget guidance are, from my perspective, mostly good news, but woefully insufficient. They show how even limited austerity encourages prioritization among weapons systems that suddenly have to compete. A few more budgets like this and we’ll be getting somewhere.

The White House has not yet released the actual budget, but the Pentagon yesterday released a new document that explains the minor cuts in line for its slice. The document, unlike all the other defense strategy and guidance documents that have come out in recent years, sticks to plain English, avoids geopolitical gobbledygook, and tells you the budgetary impacts of its assertions. For that alone the Pentagon deserves some credit.

The document claims to be a guide to savings of $487 billion over 10 years. But you only get that figure by counting against past White House budget requests and their associated spending trajectory. We are saving just $6 billion from fiscal year 2012 to 2013, or 3.2% adjusted for inflation. If we leave out falling war costs, we have essentially frozen defense spending for two fiscal years (2011 and 2012), letting it grow at about inflation and then slightly slower, respectively. The Pentagon expects defense spending to grow at the rate of inflation or faster starting in fiscal year 2014, although their estimates of inflation are self-serving.

The new spending trajectory would cut about 8 percent from the base budget by the end of the decade. That’s from a budget that doubled in real terms from 1998 until 2012. And some of those savings are not really saved; they have simply migrated into the war budget. Keep in mind also that those savings are just a plan, one that is unlikely to last, particularly as presidents and Congresses change.

The biggest change in this budget is the beginning in a reduction of ground forces. The document says we will cut 80,000 troops from the Army and 20,000 from the Marines. The rationale is solid: we are probably not going to be committing large numbers of troops to another occupation of a populous country in revolt any time soon. Yet the cut leaves both forces with more personnel than they had prior to the expansion of ground forces that began in 2008. A real strategic shift away from occupational warfare would entail a bigger drawdown of Army and Marine personnel.

The document also reaffirms the administration’s decision to remove two army brigades from Europe, roughly halving our combat presence there. That’s good news given the absence of threat there and our NATO allies’ free-riding on U.S. taxpayers. But it only amounts to recommitting to a Bush administration plan. And we are unfortunately adding troops in the Philippines and Australia, at best a useless gesture that may encourage China’s military buildup.

The budget also takes a useful step in reducing the amount of tactical Air Force squadrons by six. Given the precision-revolution in targeting that makes each aircraft far more destructive and the increased Navy capability to strike targets from carriers, far bigger cuts in these forces are possible. Oddly, this reduction comes without a planned reduction in the purchase of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

Even worse, the Pentagon here reaffirms its commitment to the F-35B—the short-take-off and vertical landing version—taking it off “probation.” That version is meant to fly on amphibious landing ships to support missions where Marines attack shorelines. It’s hard to imagine such a mission where helicopters are insufficient for air-support and there is no carrier-based aircraft available to help the Marines, especially now that the Pentagon is again planning on operating 11 carriers.

The new version of the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle is evidence of austerity forcing choices. The Pentagon now wants to cancel it because it is at least as expensive as the U-2 manned aircraft, which accomplishes similar tasks. This budget also usefully endorses the early retirement of some of our airlift capacity and tries to kill a new Army ground combat vehicle.

Another positive development is the request for two new rounds of base closures. This process requires legislation from Congress to form a Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC).

Still, the hard choices here are few. Many observers were hopeful that budget savings would include cutting our excessive means of delivering nuclear weapons. But while the proposal delays production of the new ballistic missile submarine and speaks vaguely of a “different” sort of nuclear arsenal, it supports the continuation of the triad. There is still hope on this front, however. The Air Force plans to build its next bomber initially without nuclear weapons delivery capability, adding it later in development. That amounts to dangling bait for budget cutters. Like the F-35B, the nuclear bomber has an unnecessary mission that a more austere budget would cause us to reconsider

So while the changes in this budget may be the first step toward a more restrained military posture, including perhaps a strategy of offshore balancing, they are a minor one. A true offshore balancing strategy would involve a greater shift of resources from the Army to the Navy. This budget, by contrast, seems unlikely to end the traditional budget split where each service gets roughly one-third of the base.

Unsurprisingly, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta used his press conference yesterday to push Congress to amend the Budget Control Act to avoid sequestration, the across-the-board cuts in the Pentagon’s budget due next January, which would roughly double the cuts outlined here. I have argued that these pleas seem to play into Republicans’ hand in the coming budget negotiations. Readers should also know that the Pentagon could avoid the “meat-axe” nature of sequestration (to use Panetta’s language) by budgeting at the level sequestration would accomplish, roughly $492 billion, or about what non-war defense spending was in 2007. That would let the Pentagon choose how to make cuts. The strategic insights guiding these minor cuts could be exploited to make those larger ones.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

The New Pentagon Budget: Better, but Not Great is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the latest issue of Virtual Mentor, a journal of the American Medical Association, I try to capture the multiple absurdities that make up ObamaCare. An encapsulation:

During the initial debate over ObamaCare, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) famously said, “We have to pass [it] so you can find out what’s in it.” One irreverent heir to Hippocrates quipped, “That’s what I tell my patients when I ask them for a stool sample.” The similarities scarcely end there…

ObamaCare supporters are ignoring the federal government’s dire fiscal situation; ignoring the law’s impact on premiums, jobs, and access to health insurance; ignoring that a strikingly similar law has sent health care costs higher in Massachusetts; ignoring public opinion, which has been solidly against the law for more than 2 years; ignoring the law’s failures (when they’re not declaring them successes); and ignoring that the law was so incompetently drafted that it cannot be implemented without shredding the separation of powers, the rule of law, and the U.S. Constitution itself. Rather than confront their own errors of judgment, they self-soothe: The public just doesn’t understand the law. The more they learn about it, the more they’ll like it…

This denial takes its most sophisticated form in the periodic surveys that purport to show how those silly voters still don’t understand the law. (In the mind of the ObamaCare zombie, no one really understands the law until they support it.) A prominent health care journalist had just filed her umpteenth story on such surveys when I asked her, “At what point do you start to question whether ObamaCare supporters are just kidding themselves?”

Her response? “Soon…”

(For more proof that ObamaCare supporters can draw from an apparently bottomless well of denial, see this article by Politico.)

ObamaCare–The Way of the Dodo is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Wall Street Journal notes today that the federal government spent more money in the just-concluded 2011 fiscal year than in any year in history, and no one noticed. What happened to all that austerity and all those spending cuts that we heard about all year? Well, some of us warned over the past year that they were all smoke and mirrors.

Now that the year’s over, you can see in this chart from the Journal that the federal government spent more and borrowed more in 2011 than in any previous year—$900 billion more than just four years ago, and $150 billion more than last year:

The Biggest Budget in History is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Greg Sargent cites a CNN poll question:

As you may know, the agreement would cut about one trillion dollars in government spending over the next ten years with provisions to make additional spending cuts in the future. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of the cuts in government spending included in the debt ceiling agreement?

Approve 65

Disapprove 30

Sargent continues:

Sixty five percent approve of deal’s spending cuts. But it gets worse. Of the 30 percent who disapprove, 13 percent think the cuts haven’t gotten far enough, and only 15 percent think the cuts go too far. One sixth of Americans agree with the liberal argument about the deal.

About 20 percent of Americans self-identify as liberals. This would suggest that all non-liberal Americans and one-fourth of self-identifying liberals approve of the deal or think the cuts have not gone far enough. It could also mean that some non-liberal Americans disapprove of the deal and more than one-quarter of liberals approve of it. Either interpretation will not encourage those who believe government should be larger.

Still, the political agenda is defined as cuts, and the public seems willing to go along. 2008 seems like a generation ago.

A Turning Point? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Congressional Republicans have said that spending cuts must be at least as large as an increase in the debt ceiling. Negotiations over lifting the debt ceiling are ongoing, but the “magic number,” so-to-speak, would be around $2 trillion in spending cuts.

Cutting $2 trillion in federal spending sounds like a lot, but it’s actually relatively small because the cuts would likely occur over ten years. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent budget baseline, the federal government will spend almost $46 trillion over the next ten years.

The following chart shows what $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next ten years looks like when measured against the CBO’s baseline. Even with the cuts, federal spending would still increase by $1.8 trillion:

Rather than actually cutting spending, federal spending (and debt) would continue to grow – just at a slightly lower rate. And as Chris Edwards continues to warn, there is a strong possibility that some or all of the “cuts” could be phony.

$2 Trillion in Cuts in Perspective is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Congressional Budget Office released the latest edition of its annual forecast of where the federal government’s budget is headed. The numbers are new but the message is the same: the budget is on an unsustainable path. According to the CBO’s more politically-realistic “alternative scenario,” federal debt as a share of GDP will hit 109 percent in 2021 and would approach 190 percent in 2035.

For those mistaken souls who believe that merely eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government programs can solve the problem, the CBO has news for you:

In the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) long-term projections of spending, growth in noninterest spending as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) is attributable entirely to increases in spending on several large mandatory programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and (to a lesser extent) insurance subsidies that will be provided through the health insurance exchanges established by the March 2010 health care legislation. The health care programs are the main drivers of that growth; they are responsible for 80 percent of the total projected rise in spending on those mandatory programs over the next 25 years.

Others believe that “tax cuts for the rich” are the source of the problem. But according to the CBO’s alternative scenario, if the Bush tax cuts are extended and the Alternative Minimum Tax continues to be patched, federal revenues as a share of GDP will still exceed the post-war average by the decade’s end. Under the CBO’s standard baseline, which assumes that those policies will not be continued, federal revenues as a share of GDP will go zooming by the historic average. That might be good for politicians, bureaucrats, and other “tax eaters,” but it wouldn’t be good for the country’s economic welfare.

The problem is clearly spending and the GOP has rightly made spending cuts a key condition to lifting the debt ceiling. The magic number being reported is $2 trillion in cuts. That sounds like a lot of money – and it is – but it’s likely that those cuts are to be achieved over 10 years. According to the CBO’s most recent estimates, the federal government will spend almost $46 trillion over the next 10 years. And as Chris Edwards has been repeatedly warning (see here, here, and here), there’s a possibility that the cuts will be of the “phony” variety.

CBO’s Long-Term Budget Outlook is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As I have explained elsewhere, tax increases are a bad idea – unless you favor bigger government.

And I’ve already added my two cents to the tax debate between Senator Coburn and Grover Norquist regarding the desirability of higher taxes.

So it won’t surprise anyone to know that I fully agree with this new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, which offers seven reasons why higher taxes are a bad idea.

The video is narrated by Piyali Bhattacharya of Young Americans for Liberty, and here are her seven reasons.

1. Tax increases are not needed
2. Tax increases encourage more spending
3. Tax increases harm economic performance
4. Tax increases foment social discord
5. Tax increases almost never raise as much revenue as projected
6. Tax increases encourage more loopholes
7. Tax increases undermine competitiveness

I think reasons #1, #2, #3, and #5 are the most powerful.

To a considerable degree, my video on balancing the budget makes the same point as reason #1 about why higher taxes are unnecessary. Simply stated, balancing the budget merely requires a modest degree of fiscal discipline, such as capping spending so it only grows 2 percent per year.

And if tax increases are not needed to balance the budget, then the only purpose they serve is to facilitate a bigger burden of government spending, which is why I like reason #2.

And reason #3 is standard economic analysis, making the common-sense point that if you punish something, you get less of it. This is why it is so misguided to impose higher tax rates on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

Last but not least, reason #5 is just another way of saying that the Laffer Curve is real, as I explain in this tutorial.

Seven Reasons to Oppose Higher Taxes is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• New research suggests that there has been more monetary and macroeconomic instability since the Federal Reserve’s inception than in the decades preceding it.
• New thinking about the usefulness of government programs will help us from restore fiscal balance and economic well-being in America.
• New geopolitical circumstances should make us wonder: why are we still a part of NATO?
• New Deal-era jurisprudence may soon be overturned as challenges to the Affordable Care Act reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
• New means of funding public roads will increase efficiency by confronting drivers with the costs of using them, and reducing congestion:

• Reminder: If you’re in the DC area, please join us this Friday at 4:00 p.m. Eastern for a special sneak preview of Free or Equal and Q&A with Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg.

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A little over a year ago, I posted two different graphs (with the help of my colleague Charles Zakaib) that showed the growth of U.S. national security spending vs. that of other NATO allies over the last ten years. The data, based on the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual Military Balance, showed that U.S. taxpayers spend far more on our military, both as a share of total economic output, and on a per capita basis, than do any of our allies.

New data, for 2009, was made available in IISS’s Military Balance 2011, and the revised graphs are shown below. (Again, thanks to Charles for his help). As I suspected, the gap remains as wide as ever. In a few cases, it has grown wider.

As you can see, the $2,101 that every American man, woman, and child spends is nearly two and a half times as much as the average Frenchman, over three and a half times that of the average German, and more than fourteen times what the average Turk spends.

But all of these numbers are slightly misleading. The gap between what Americans spend on national security, broadly defined, and what everyone else pays, is actually wider.

For example, IISS’s graphs include only U.S. DoD budgetary authority, meaning the Pentagon’s base budget plus the costs of the wars. A more accurate “national defense” total includes nuclear weapons spending in the Department of Energy ($22.9 bn in 2009) and a catch-all category of “other” defense-related spending tucked away elsewhere in the federal budget totaling $7.25 bn. That adds another $95 a year to every American’s tax bill.

But wait, there’s more. A more accurate apples to apples comparison of all U.S. national security spending to that of other countries would at least include the Department of Veterans Affairs ($96.9 bn). Other countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium, and Portugal) include military pensions in their base budgets. Meanwhile, people in other countries would think it foolishly redundant to fund both a Department of Defense and a Department of Homeland Security, but Americans don’t (or at least Americans in Washington don’t). DHS funding in 2009 totaled $45.3 bn. All told, I estimate that the average American spent at least $2,644 on national security in 2009. The total was certainly higher in 2010 since the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan peaked in that year.

And in case you’re wondering, we spend at least 17 times as much as the average Chinese. Meanwhile, total U.S. security spending exceeds that of China, Russia, North Korea, Syria and Iran — combined – by a factor of 3.3.

As the debate over federal spending drags through the dog days of summer and into the autumn, you will hear many people talk of our government’s solemn obligation to defend the citizens of this country from foreign threats. President Obama reaffirmed on Wednesday, in case anyone doubted it: “As Commander-in-Chief, I have no greater responsibility than protecting our national security, and I will never accept cuts that compromise our ability to defend our homeland or America’s interests around the world.” (my emphasis)

Surely some of the missions that our military is asked to accomplish actually do have that effect, but the definition of “America’s interests” has expanded so dramatically over the past few decades that it is practically devoid of any meaning.

Thus, you — yes, you, American taxpayer — will be told that our national interests around the world compel us to treat the Straits of Gibraltar and Malacca as though they were of equal importance to U.S. security as that of the Straits of Florida, the 90 or so miles that separates Key West from Cuba. The Caribbean might be an American lake, but so is the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Sea of Japan. Ominous threats made by Russia, China, or Iran against their neighbors are treated as synonymous to threats to harm Americans. Every ungoverned place, everywhere in the world, you will be told, poses a dire and imminent threat to your safety and security, hence our need to fix them all. (For why this generally isn’t true, see here.)

Throughout the supposed impending discussion of our military’s roles and missions, the role that other countries should play in keeping the seas open and free, defending themselves from potentially hostile neighbors, and preventing terrorists and other non-state actors from setting up shop in a nearby land, will rarely be entertained. For many people here in Washington, that is entirely by design: they don’t want other countries to defend themselves and their interests around the world. Better that you, the U.S. taxpayers, pay these costs. To do otherwise, to reduce U.S. military spending, and to pull back our forces from certain regions around the world, thus “leaving partners elsewhere in the world to manage for themselves as best as they can,” wrote Robert Haddick yesterday at the Small Wars Journal, would result in “regional arms races, increased nuclear and missile proliferation, and the establishment of new outposts around the world by America’s rising rivals.”

Haddick is not alone in predicting that the world will descend into complete and utter chaos if other countries were responsible for defending themselves and their interests, but all such assertions are precisely that: assertions, not fact. They rely on dire predictions of a horrible future, usually based on historical examples that are completely irrelevant in the modern age, to convince American taxpayers to pay more and more, and still more, on our military, so that others do not have to spend money on theirs. What’s more, they tend to ignore the current fiscal crisis, and are generally reluctant to explain what, if anything, they would cut. So far, fearmongering has worked splendidly to distract attention from the more important discussion of what we spend today, and what we should spend tomorrow. But the facts are incontrovertible: Americans now spend more on our military than at any time since World War II, and we spend far more on a per capita basis than anyone else in the world.

So Happy Tax Day, Americans! Our reassured allies thank you for paying to defend them and their interests. (And please now excuse them as they return to their other priorities.)

Cross-posted from The National Interest

Happy Tax Day! Rest Assured. Your Money Is Well Spent Defending Rich Allies is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If you are an average American, today is a great day. According to the Tax Foundation, you have finally worked long enough and earned enough money to satisfy the annual tax demands of federal, state, and local governments.

This means you now get to keep any additional income you earn.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Tax Freedom Day only measures the direct and immediate impact of taxation. It doesn’t measure the overall burden of government. This chart from the Tax Foundation shows that the fiscal burden of government has jumped enormously since the end of the Clinton years.

Happy Tax Freedom Day! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Do the cuts (and increases) contained in the six-month spending bill House Republicans posted overnight make sense, and do they go far enough in attacking the deficit and national debt?

My response:

Today’s Arena question captures perfectly what’s missing from our current budget debate. In listing a few of the compromises contained in the six-month spending bill House Republicans posted overnight, and asking whether those cuts (and increases) go far enough in attacking the deficit and national debt, it invites us to imagine that America is one big family, arguing over how “we” should spend “our” money.

We’re not. As I wrote in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, we’re a constitutional republic, populated by discrete individuals, each with our own interests. Today’s question, perfectly understandable in the current climate, socializes us. The Framers’ Constitution freed us, to make our own individual choices.

To be sure, we have to start where we are today. But if that’s as far as we go, we’re doomed to never grasping the real problem. The Constitution was written precisely to check our appetite for “public goods.” It authorizes only a few, truly public goods. Not health care. Not education. Not most of what we spend “our” money on today. We’ve ignored the discipline it imposes, and we’re paying the price.

It’s Bigger Than the Budget is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There were reports about 10 days ago that the crowd in Washington reached a budget deal, for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year, with $33 billion of cuts. That number was disappointingly low. I wrote at the time that if this was a kiss-your-sister deal, we didn’t have any siblings that looked like Claudia Schiffer.

I knew it was unrealistic to expect the full $61 billion, but I explained that $45 billion was a realistic target.

We now have a new agreement, which supposedly is final, and the amount of budget cuts has climbed to $38 billion. So our sister is getting prettier, but she still isn’t close to being a supermodel. Here are the highlights (or lowlights) from the New York Times story.

Congressional leaders and President Obama headed off a shutdown of the government with less than two hours to spare Friday night under a tentative budget deal that would cut $38 billion from federal spending this year. …the budget measure would not include provisions sought by Republicans to limit environmental regulations and to restrict financing for Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions.

As with all deals (such as last December’s agreement extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts), there are good and bad provisions. The good news is:

• President Obama, before the current fiscal year began last October 1, wanted a $40 billion increase for these “discretionary” programs. Cutting $38 billion may not be a big number, but it is a step in the right direction. And it is the first time fiscal policy has moved in the right direction in at least 10 years.
• There will be no funding for additional IRS agents. This is a nice victory. Implementing Obamacare would require as many as 16,000 new tax bureaucrats to harass the American people, so at least that process will be stalled.
• A school choice program for Washington, DC, has been restored, thus reversing President Obama’s disgusting decision to kill the program and sacrifice poor black children to advance the greedy interests of the teacher unions.

Now let’s look at the less desirable parts of the agreement.

• Total spending jumped by almost $2 trillion during the Bush-Obama spending binge, so a $38 billion cut is almost too small to mention.
• Left-wing organizations such as Planned Parenthood will continue to feed at the public trough, something that should be objectionable to everyone, regardless of your views on abortion.
• Obamacare is not repealed (not that I ever thought that was possible) and there is no restriction on the EPA’s unilateral assertion that is has regulatory power to implement radical Kyoto-style global warming policies.

I will have more comments this week about what happens next. Suffice to say that this was just one battle in a long war.

The 2012 budget resolution, for instance, will be a key test of fiscal responsibility, but in this case the debate will be about $trillions rather than $billions. The debt limit vote will an opportunity for some much-needed reform of the budget process. And it is quite likely that there will be another potential shutdown fight when it is time to put together appropriations bills for the 2012 fiscal year, which starts October 1.

The Kiss-Your-Sister Budget Deal Is Finalized, but Claudia Schiffer Still Ain’t Your Sibling is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan is ostensibly for FY 2012, but it contains reforms with far-reaching implications for the nation’s fiscal condition.

Most of the action in his plan is on the spending side and mainly on health care entitlements: Medicare and Medicaid.  Many pundits on the left are claiming it is a political document rather than a serious budget proposal, especially because it lacks details on many of its proposed policy changes. 

One thing that stands out, as pointed out by David Leonhardt in the NYT, is that Ryan’s plan exempts people older than age 55 from bearing any share of the adjustment costs.  They should, instead, be called upon to share some of the burden, Leonhardt argues — a point that I agree with.  If seniors are receiving tens of thousands of dollars more than what they paid in for Medicare, then they should not be allowed to hide behind the tired old argument of being too old to bear any adjustment cost.  Indeed, seniors hold most of the nation’s assets and a progressive-minded reform would ask them to fork over a small share to relieve the financial burden that must otherwise be imposed on young workers and future generations.

The numbers presented by Leonhardt are computed by analysts at the Urban Institute.  However, those numbers aren’t quite as one-sided as Leonhardt and Urban scholars suggest, because they only compare Medicare payroll taxes by age group to Medicare benefits.  A large part of Medicare benefits (Medicare’s outpatient care, physicians’ fees, and federal premium support for prescription drugs) are financed out of general tax revenues, not just Medicare taxes. General tax revenues, of course, include revenues from income taxes, indirect taxes, and other non-social-insurance taxes and fees.  Seniors pay some of those taxes as well — especially by way of capital income and capital gains taxes — but the Urban calculations fail to account for this.  That means that the net benefit to seniors from Medicare is smaller than Leonhardt claims in his column.  I don’t know whether it would bring the per-person Medicare taxes and benefits as close to each other as they are for Social Security, however. (See Leonhardt’s column for more on this point.)

Leonhardt also notes that Chairman Ryan’s proposal leaves out revenue increases as a potential solution to the growing debt problem.  Leonhardt argues that wealthy individuals (mostly large and small entrepreneurs) received high returns on assets during the last few years (pre-recession) and could afford to pay more in taxes.

But it would be poor policy to raise these entrepreneurs’ income taxes — that would distort incentives to work, invest, innovate, and hire in their businesses.  Instead, policymakers should consider reducing high-earners’ Medicare and Social Security benefits (premium supports under the Ryan plan) in a progressive manner, including allowing them to opt out of Medicare and Social Security completely if they wish to.

During recent business trips to a few Midwestern towns, I met several investors and professionals in real estate, financial planning, and manufacturing concerns, most of whom expressed their willingness to forego social insurance benefits during retirement.  So there seems to be some public support for such a reform of social insurance programs.

Why Should Social Insurance Reform Not Affect Those Over Age 54? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Washington is filled with groups that piously express their devotion to balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility, so it is rather revealing that some of these groups have less-than-friendly responses to Congressman Ryan’s budget plan.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, for instance, portrays itself as a bunch of deficit hawks. So you would think they would be doing cartwheels to celebrate a lawmaker who makes a real proposal that would control red ink. Yet Maya MacGuineas, president of the CRFB, basically rejects Ryan’s plan because it fails to increase the tax burden.

…while the proposal deserves praise for being bold, the national discussion has moved beyond just finding a plan with sufficient savings to finding one that can generate enough support to move forward. All parts of the budget, including defense and revenues, will have to be part of a budget deal… Now that both the White House and House Republicans have made their opening bids, this continues to reinforce our belief that a comprehensive plan to fix the budget like the one the Fiscal Commission recommended has the best hope of moving forward.

I’m mystified by Maya’s reference to an “opening bid” by the White House. What on earth is she talking about? Obama punted in his budget and didn’t even endorse the findings of his own Fiscal Commission. But I digress.

Another example of a group called Third Way, which purports to favor “moderate policy and political ideas” and “private-sector economic growth.” Sounds like they should be cheerleaders for Congressman Ryan’s plan, but they are even more overtly hostile to his proposal to reduce the burden of government.

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget is a deep disappointment. There is a serious framework on the table for a bipartisan deal on our long term budget crisis. It’s the Bowles-Simpson blueprint, now being turned into legislation by the Gang of Six. It puts everything on the table – a specific plan to save Social Security, significant defense cuts, large reductions in tax expenditures and reforms to make Medicare and Medicaid more efficient, not eliminate them.

That sounds hard left, not third way. But it’s not unusual. Many of the self-proclaimed deficit hawks on Capitol Hill also have been either silent or critical of Ryan’s plan.

Which leaves me to conclude that what they really want are tax increases, and they simply use rhetoric about debt and deficits to push their real agenda.

Why Are Self-Proclaimed Deficit Hawks Unenthusiastic about the Ryan Budget? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

For all the boldness of Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposal to reduce projected federal expenditures by $6 trillion, an initiative that I support, the Pentagon’s budget emerges essentially unscathed in Ryan’s plan. This is a mistake on both fiscal and strategic grounds. Significant cuts in military spending must be on the table as the nation struggles to close its fiscal gap without saddling individuals and businesses with burdensome taxes and future generations with debt. Such cuts will also force a reappraisal of our military’s roles and missions that is long overdue.

The Pentagon’s base budget has nearly doubled during the past decade. Throw in the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus nuclear weapons spending in the Department of Energy, and a smattering of other programs, and the total amount that Americans spend annually on our military exceeds $700 billion. These costs might come down slightly as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are drawn to a close — as they should be — but according to the Obama administration’s own projections, the U.S. government will still spend nearly $6.5 trillion on the military over the next decade. Surely Rep. Ryan could have found a way to cut…something from this amount?

Defense is an undisputed core function of government — any government — and spending for that purpose should not be treated on an equal basis with the many other dubious roles and missions that the U.S. federal government now performs. But please note the emphasis. The U.S. Department of Defense should be focused on that purpose: defending the United States. But by acting as the world’s de facto policeman, we have essentially twisted the concept of “the common defence” to include the defense of the whole world, including billions of people who are not parties to our unique social contract.

The rest of the world is more than content to free ride on Uncle Sam’s largesse. Absolved of their core obligation to provide for the defense of their own citizens, the governments in other countries have been busy expanding the social welfare state and growing the public sector. The true burdens fall on U.S. taxpayers who spend two and a half times more on national security programs than do the French or the British, five times more than citizens living in other NATO countries, and seven and a half times more than the average Japanese. Meanwhile, our troops and their families are struggling to cover the many commitments that their civilian leaders have unwisely incurred. And yet the defenders of the status quo — those who prefer that Americans pay these costs and bear these burdens — cry for more. More money and more missions.

Fiscal hawks such as Ryan are not serious if they cannot see massive waste and inefficiency in the Pentagon. Robert Gates’ ballyhooed reforms barely scratch the surface of the problem. Mismanagement of major weapons programs is rampant; cost overruns are the norm. A meaningful cap on future defense expenditures will force the Pentagon to seriously confront these inefficiencies, and might also precipitate some useful competition between the services on who is best positioned to keep the country safe and secure.

If Washington is serious about cutting spending, and if the Pentagon’s budget is included in the search for savings, then we need to adopt a different strategy, one that would husband our resources, focus the military on a few core missions, call on other countries to take responsibility for their own defense, and share the burdens of policing the global commons. A serious proposal for reining in runaway Pentagon spending would have precipitated such a strategic shift. By giving the Pentagon a free pass, Rep. Ryan practically ensures that such a discussion never sees the light of day.

Cross-posted at The National Interest.

Rep. Ryan’s Budget Avoids Cuts to Military Spending is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• It’s time for a little less hubris.
• It’s time for a government shutdown.
• It’s time to stop shooting ourselves in the foot.
• It’s time for an adult conversation on the federal budget, and Chairman Ryan’s plan is a good start.
• It’s time to rethink our strategy in Afghanistan:

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Republicans have a big opportunity to undo Obamacare and reform Medicaid and Medicare all at once.
• It’s a good thing, too, because we’re facing a big debt crisis and if we don’t change course, federal spending will crest 42% of GDP by 2050.
• There’s also a big elephant in the room in an excessively complicated tax code.
• One has to wonder if the Republicans intend to put the big sacred cow of defense spending on the table.
• Unrelated to the budget, education choice proponents scored a big victory in the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday in ACSTO v. Winn, a decision that upheld education tax credits:
  

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, will unveil his FY2012 budget tomorrow. Not all the details are public yet, but what we do know is very encouraging.

Ryan’s plan is a broad reform package, including limits on so-called discretionary spending, limits on excessive pay for federal bureaucrats, and steep reductions in corporate welfare.

But the two most exciting parts are entitlement reform and tax reform. Ryan’s proposals would simultaneously address the long-run threat of bloated government and put in place tax policies that will boost growth and improve competitiveness.

1. The long-run fiscal threat to America is entitlement spending. Ryan’s plan will address this crisis by block-granting Medicaid to the states (repeating the success of the welfare reform legislation of the 1990s) and transforming Medicare for future retirees into a “premium-support” plan (similar to what was proposed as part of the bipartisan Domenici-Rivlin Debt Reduction Task Force).
2. America’s tax system is a complicated disgrace that manages to both undermine growth and promote corruption. The answer is a simple and fair flat tax, and Ryan’s plan will take an important step in that direction with lower tax rates, less double taxation of saving and investment, and fewer distorting loopholes.

One potential criticism is that the plan reportedly will not balance the budget within 10 years, at least based on the antiquated and inaccurate scoring systems used by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. While I would prefer more spending reductions, I’m not overly fixated on getting to balance with 10 years.

What matters most is “bending the cost curve” of government. Obama’s budget leaves government on auto-pilot and leaves America on a path to becoming a decrepit European-style welfare state. Ryan’s budget, by contrast, would shrink the burden of federal spending relative to the productive sector of the economy.

Along with other Cato colleagues, I’ll have more analysis of the plan when it is officially released.

Congressman Ryan’s Budget Is a Big Step in the Right Direction is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

According to news reports, Democrats and Republicans are unlikely to reach any sort of budget agreement before April 8, when a short-term spending bill for the current fiscal year expires.

Barring some new development, this could mean a shutdown of the non-essential parts of the government.

This makes both sides very nervous. Democrats don’t want the spending spigot turned off and are worried that voters might conclude that there’s no reason to ever re-open departments such as Housing and Urban Development. Republicans, meanwhile, mostly worry that they might look unreasonable and get blamed if certain parts of the government are mothballed and voters can’t get passports or visit national parks.

Given this state of play, what’s the best strategy for fiscal conservatives, libertarians, and other advocates of smaller government?

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard thinks Republicans should continue with short-term spending bills.

…the incremental strategy is working. Republicans have passed two short-term measures to keep the government in operation since early March while slashing $10 billion in spending. At this rate, they would achieve the target of GOP congressional leaders of lopping off $61 billion from President Obama’s proposed budget in the final seven months of the 2011 fiscal year. There’s every reason to believe the incremental strategy would continue to succeed.

He’s worried that a more confrontational approach, where the GOP passes a take-it-or-leave-it spending bill, might backfire – even though any shutdown would exist solely because Senator Reid and/or President Obama refused to act.

Would a shutdown give Republicans more muscle in negotiating for cuts? …Maybe it would. But it might not. …So long as they control the Senate and White House, Democrats will reject massive cuts. Republicans also want to bar spending for Planned Parenthood, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Mr. Obama’s health-care program. Attach any of these prohibitions to a spending measure and Democratic opposition is certain. Should Republicans insist, we’ll get a government shutdown. This is a big gamble. …Indeed it might discredit Republicans and boost Mr. Obama in the same way the shutdown in 1995 hurt Republicans and lifted President Bill Clinton out of the doldrums. It could alienate independent voters so critical to the Republican triumph in 2010. True enough, the political atmosphere is more favorable to serious spending reductions than it was 16 years ago. …But why take a chance?

I think Barnes is a bit off in his portrayal of what happened in 1995, as I’ve previously explained, but these are all fair points. A “shutdown” fight could be considered uncharted territory.

Keith Hennessey, a former Hill staffer and Bush Administration official, also is skeptical of a confrontational approach. Instead, he suggests that the GOP increase the pressure on Democrats by slowly increasing the amount of weekly spending cuts.

While negotiating with the President’s team and Senate Democrats, in this variant House Republicans continue to pass short-term Continuing Resolutions as long as there is not an acceptable full-year deal. In these repeated future CRs, they ratchet up the spending cuts by the paltry figure of only $100 million each week. …Under this new variant, as April 8th approaches House Republicans would pass another three week CR, one which cuts $2.1 B in its first week, $2.2 B in its second week, and $2.3 B in its third week. …Such a tiny weekly increment would be nearly impossible for Democrats to reject. And yet if continued through the end of this fiscal year, $4.5 B of discretionary spending would be cut in the final week, that of September 23rd. This strategy…poses zero additional risk for Congressional Republicans. They would maintain the high ground on spending cuts and remain on the offensive for the next six months.

There’s a lot to like about Keith’s approach. If successful, he explains, GOPers could wind up with $82 billion of cuts rather than just $61 billion.

But here’s my concern about an incremental strategy. What makes anyone think that the left will go along with short-term spending bills, regardless of whether they cut $2 billion per week, or even more?

Democrats already have agreed to $10 billion of cuts, and even though that’s very trivial when compared to total spending (akin to a couple of french fries out of a Big Mac meal), the pro-spending lobbies and their allies on Capitol Hill are balking at the thought of additional cuts. So while it might be possible to push through a couple of additional short-term spending bills, there will come a point when Democrats refuse to play ball. And when that happens, we’re back to a partial shutdown.

Here’s how constitutional lawyer James Bopp, Jr., explained the issue in a piece for the Washington Times.

A government shutdown is inevitable because President Obama will insist on it. Nothing the Republicans do, short of total capitulation, will prevent this from happening. …With a three-week extension of government funding (which included $6 billion in cuts) expiring April 8, now is the time to escalate one’s bid. Demand $12 billion in cuts the next time. And when the shutdown occurs because of an Obama veto or a vote in the Democrat-controlled Senate, the House should keep passing bills to reopen the government, coupling it with more spending cuts. …There is a fundamental contradiction in the Democrats’ shutting down the government. The Democrats are the party of government. It is like a bank robber, caught in the act, who threatens to pull the trigger on himself if arrested; what would the cop say but, “Go ahead”? The government shutdown threat defeats the Democrats own objective and is thus ultimately self-defeating, while the Republicans protect the bank depositors – the taxpayers – from the bank robber.

I think this is largely correct, particularly in that there almost certainly will be a shutdown fight. The only question is when it will happen. And if a shutdown battle is inevitable, advocates of smaller government should decide whether it’s better to have that fight sooner rather than later.

My instinct is that it would be better to fight now. GOP resolve presumably will decrease over time, particularly since the “easy” spending cuts get used up first. Moreover, it is quite likely that a strategy of short-term spending bills will complicate GOP efforts to get budget process reform in a couple of months in exchange for an increase in the debt limit.

Democrats surely don’t want the GOP to have another opportunity to restrain the size of government, so they would insist on an increase in the federal government’s borrowing authority as the price for approving whatever short-term spending bill is being considered around that time. Republicans presumably will balk at that demand. But that brings us back, once again, to a shutdown fight. Only this time, it will be complicated by demagogic assertions of a default.

So long as the final result is a smaller burden of government, there is no right or wrong answer about the process. It’s simply a question of which approach is more likely to achieve the desired outcome. I think fighting now is better than fighting later, but if the GOP chooses a strategy of short-term spending bills, I hope I’m wrong.

Budget Battle Update: It’s About Preparing for the Inevitable Fight, not Forcing a Shutdown is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I posted recently at International Liberty about the stunning political incompetence of Republican Senators, who reportedly are willing to give Obama an increase in the debt limit in exchange for a vote (yes, just a vote) on a balanced budget amendment.

As I explained, there is no way they can get the necessary two-thirds support to approve an amendment, so why trade a meaningless and symbolic vote on a BBA for meaningful and real approval of more borrowing authority for Obama? My analogy yesterday was that this was like trading an all-star baseball player for a utility infielder in the minor leagues.

I did acknowledge that forcing a vote on a BBA was a worthwhile endeavor, but said that the GOP has that power anyhow, so why trade away something valuable to get something you already can get for free?

Little did I realize that Republicans already did force a vote on the balanced budget amendment. Less than one month ago, on March 2, Senator Lee of Utah got a vote on a “Sense of the Senate” resolution in favor of a balanced budget amendment. Senator Lee’s resolution received 58 votes, which is nice, but an actual amendment would need a two-thirds supermajority, so this test vote demonstrated that there is no way to approve an amendment this year.

I’m glad Senator Lee proposed his resolution. I’m glad Senators were forced to go on the record.

But I’m mystified, flabbergasted, and stunned that Republicans apparently are willing to give Obama a bigger debt limit in exchange for something they already got.

Returning to our baseball analogy, this would be like the Yankees giving Derek Jeter to the Red Sox in exchange for a player they already have, such as Alex Rodriguez. I imagine New York sportswriters would be dumbfounded by such stupidity and would rip the team’s management to shreds. So that gives you an idea of how I feel about what’s happening in Washington.

As I noted in my earlier post, I’ll soon write about the fiscal reforms fiscal conservatives should demand in exchange for a higher debt limit.

What Are Republicans Thinking?!? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog