The Redhunter

Follow the link above if the charts don't fit well on your screen. Also follow the link for dollar figures of each spending category.

The bottom line is this; the deficit will be somewhere around $1.3 billion. Can we close the gap entirely with spending cuts?

Symbols Count

Before liberal commenters point it out, yes I know that eliminating earmarks won't do squat towards reducing the deficit. They account for less than 1 percent of spending, and even without the earmark process much of the money would be spent anyway.

But earmarks are still worth eliminating because the process behind them stinks so bad. There is value in eliminating them for that reason alone.

For that matter, I think that we ought to entirely eliminate the Department of Education and zero out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but again, neither are going to get us very far towards reducing the deficit.

A Serious Thinker

What prompted this debate were several posts by Kevin D. Williamson at National Review's Exchequer blog. I'm going to post a few in their entirely and commenters can make of them what they will.

I'll tell you up front that I am sympathetic to Williamson's arguments, and that for a variety of reasons (including this one) I'm not a fan of Grover Norquist.

Grover Norquist Is Living in Candyland
October 18, 2010 1:11 P.M.
By Kevin D. Williamson

Tags: Debt, Deficits, Despair, Fiscal Armageddon, Mitch Daniels, Republicans, Taxes

So it turns out that the cure for "epistemic closure" is great quantities of crystal meth. The things you learn from Grover Norquist.

In case you missed it, Norquist came down like a runaway gravel truck on Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, a favorite around these parts. Governor Daniels's offense was declaring himself open to the possibility that a value-added tax might be an acceptable part of a wide-ranging reform of the federal tax system. Norquist replied, in a Politico interview:

"This is outside the bounds of acceptable modern Republican thought, and it is only the zone of extremely left-wing Democrats who publicly talk about those things because all Democrats pretending to be moderates wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot poll. Absent some explanation, such as large quantities of crystal meth, this is disqualifying. This is beyond the pale."

Here's the problem: The deficit is, by my always-suspect English-major math, about 36.3 percent of federal spending ($1.29 trillion deficit out of $3.55 trillion spending). For comparison: Defense accounts for about 18 percent of federal spending. So you could cut out the entire national-security budget, and another Pentagon-sized chunk of non-military spending, and not quite close that deficit. You could cut the Pentagon to $0.00 and eliminate Social Security entirely and just barely get there.

Even great heaping quantities of crystal meth would not be enough to convince me that is going to happen.

Don't get me wrong: In a perfect world, Exchequer would love to see the budget balanced and some tax cuts enabled through spending reductions alone. Exchequer would also like to be dating Marisa Miller, driving a Morgan Aero, and running a four-minute mile, developments that are about as plausible as Congress's cutting 36.3 percent of federal spending. Not going to happen.

So, our choices are this: 1. Hold out for the best-case scenario, in which a newly elected Speaker Boehner gives President Obama the complete works of Milton Friedman and everybody agrees to cutting federal spending by more than a third. 2. Keep running deficits and piling up debt. 3. Raise taxes. My preferences, in order, go: 1, 3, 2. And No. 2 is not really acceptable.

Like it or not, taxes are going up: If not today, then in the near future. Even once the deficit is under control, that debt is still going to have to be paid down, lest debt service alone overwhelm the federal budget, necessitating even more tax hikes. If Grover Norquist thinks there's a tax-free way out of this mess that is both politically and economically realistic, he is living in a fantasy. There's an old joke that goes: Neurotics build castles in the sky; psychotics live in them. And Grover Norquist seeks tax protection for them.

Norquist's outfit, Americans for Tax Reform, does a lot of good things. (And so has Grover Norquist, over the years.) But here's how it describes itself:

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle.

That's not a campaign against Big Government -- it's a campaign against math. As ye spend, so shall ye tax. Denying that is not a principle -- it's a tantrum. ATR's pledge reads:

"I _____ pledge to the taxpayers of the __________ district, of the state of __________, and to all the people of this state, that I will oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes."

And here is how it should read:

"I _____ pledge to the taxpayers of the __________ district, of the state of __________, and to all the people of this state, that I will oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase spending."

Spending is the issue, not taxes. Spending is the virus, taxes are the symptom. Norquistism, by focusing on the taxing side of the ledger rather than on the spending side, has for decades enabled Republican spending shenanigans of the sort that helped put the party in the minority and ruined its reputation for fiscal sobriety; it is of a piece with naïve supply-siderism. The Bush-era deficits, and the subsequent discrediting of Republicans' fiscal conservatism, are the product.

Give me the grown-up despair of Mitch Daniels any day over the happy-talk daydream that says we're getting out of this mess without paying for it.

And

Real Deficit Reduction vs. Theoretical Deficit Reduction
November 10, 2010 8:11 P.M.
By Kevin D. Williamson

A reader asks: "So an Obama commission proposes a $1 trillion-plus tax hike, and you, a managing editor at the flagship conservative publication, endorse it? Exactly how or why is this a conservative position?"

Answer: A conservative's first duty is to deal with reality -- not with the theoretical world we wish existed, not with ideology, and not with wishful thinking. We are running a deficit of 40 percent, and it is implausible to think that a government with a Republican House, a Democratic Senate, and Obama in the White House is going to balance the budget by cutting 40 percent of spending.

I think it is equally implausible that a government with a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and Ron Paul/Sarah Palin/Mitch Daniels/Rush Limbaugh/The Ghost of Ronald Reagan in the White House is going to balance the budget with spending cuts alone. Why should I rely on the performance of theoretical Republicans when I have the evidence of actual Republican Congresses and actual Republican administrations to inform me that radical spending cuts are unlikely under a unified Republican government?

The burden of taxation is not equal to what the government collects; it is equal to what the government spends. Deficit spending just greases the skids for ever-more-incontinent fiscal shenanigans -- I'd rather the taxpayers bear the pain of government spending as the money is spent than evade it, kicking the taxes down the road to the next generation. We can either pay the taxes today or pay them in the future -- with interest, trillions of dollars in interest. The Bowles-Simpson proposal is far from perfect, but it is three-and-a-half times better than anything I expected from a panel with any political proximity to Barack Obama. It's a good start, and it's politically viable. If the Republicans are smart, they'll run with it and remind voters every five minutes that this is the proposal of the Obama deficit commission's co-chairmen.

If I see a better plan with a real chance of being enacted, it will have my support. But given a choice between an ideologically pure program that never is enacted and a problematic one that gets the job done, albeit imperfectly, I'll take real deficit reduction over theoretical deficit reduction every time.

Nancy Pelosi hates it. That's a useful piece of evidence, too.