Small Government for Thee, But Not for Me

I have a new piece up at Discourse about “The Fake Fight Over the Debt Ceiling.”

I focus particularly on the most revealing moment from the State of the Union address, in which Republicans roared in outrage at the suggestion that they might want to make the slightest change to Social Security or Medicare.

One of the more convincing critiques of the Tea Party movement, back when the small-government faction of the right was briefly ascendant, is that it consisted of people who wanted to get the government out of our lives, while making sure they keep getting their Social Security checks. There are a lot of people who want to cut government spending—but only the spending that goes to somebody else, not the spending that goes to them. In other words: Small government for thee, but not for me.

So these voters didn’t show up for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in 2012, when Ryan had tentatively maneuvered the party toward reform of the big entitlement programs. Since then, Republicans turned to Donald Trump, who promised during the 2016 campaign not to touch entitlements and then massively increased government spending in every year of his presidency, even before the pandemic. The result is that more than $7 trillion of our current $31 trillion in debt—nearly a quarter of it—was racked up under recent Republican control.

And now they want to stamp their feet about lower spending without actually cutting anything.

The 2012 election was the last time anyone made a remotely serious attempt to deal with entitlements. They did it because the eventual collapse of those programs is a mathematical certainty. But because they didn’t address the problem when it was 20 to 25 years away, it is now ten to twelve years away, and actually closer.

The United States currently spends about $400 billion each year just paying interest on our debt. Over the next 10 years, this is projected to increase to at least $1.2 trillion. But all other spending is going to increase, too, particularly on entitlements. Combined spending on Social Security and Medicare is currently $1.9 trillion per year. With the Baby Boomers retiring, that will increase by 2028 to something closer to $3.8 trillion, with no concomitant increase in payroll tax revenue. And all of this will happen within the term of whoever wins the next presidential election. Dealing with it is not a problem for the far-off future. It is a problem for now.

But as I point out, the reason we haven’t addressed this problem is that it requires us to think seriously about big questions like the role of government, and nobody wants to do that. As I put it, “It is easy to dismiss these big decisions as overly broad and ideological, as mere theory to be set aside for the demands of practical politics. But eventually these questions will become concrete, specific and mathematical.”

Read the whole thing.

I link in passing to an article I wrote years ago that I am more and more convinced will turn out to be right: We will eventually reform Social Security by not reforming it at all and just letting it run out of money and pay fewer benefits. Why do I regard this as the most likely outcome? Because it’s the one that never requires anyone to vote for it. Ask politicians to vote for cutting Social Security, and they won’t do it. Ask them to vote for higher taxes, and they won’t do it. But what if you simply expect them to sit back, do nothing, and complain how everything is the other party’s fault? That’s an easy bet.

Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good description of the current fake showdown over the debt ceiling, so it’s starting already.