Burden of Government Spending Will Be $2 Trillion Higher in 2023 According to Obama’s Budget

If you include all the appendices, there are thousands of pages in the President’s new budget.

But the first thing I do every year is find the table showing how fast the burden of government spending will increase.

That’s Table S-1 of the budget, and it shows that the President is proposing $41 trillion of spending over the next 10 years.

But perhaps most relevant, he wants the federal budget to be $2 trillion higher in 2023 than it is today.

And this is based on the White House’s dodgy assumptions. The numbers almost certainly will look a bit worse when the Congressional Budget Office re-estimates the President’s budget.

By the way, there’s a reason the above chart looks familiar. It almost identical to the ones I put together last year and the year before. So give Obama points for consistency. Rain or shine, year in and year out, he proposes that government spending should rise by $2 trillion every time he proposes a budget.

He’s also consistent in that he demands higher taxes. Americans for Tax Reform has a list of the “Top 10” tax hikes in the President’s budget. Most of them are based on the President’s class-warfare ideology, though he also wants to hit lower-income people with a big hike in the tobacco tax.

Another example of unfortunate consistency is that the President whiffs on entitlement reform. Unlike the House of Representatives, there’s no proposal to fix Medicare or Medicaid.

He does have a “chained CPI” proposal that would slightly reduce cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security, but that would be a substitute for the reforms that are needed to both control costs and give workers the option to boost retirement income with personal accounts.

Moreover, chained CPI is a huge tax hike, as explained by my colleague Chris Edwards.

So what’s the bottom line? Well, there isn’t one. We’re going to have gridlock for the foreseeable future. The House has passed a decent budget with some modest entitlement reform, but there’s no way that the Senate will accept that plan.

Similarly, there’s no way (knock on wood!) that the House will acquiesce to the President’s raise-taxes-but-leave-spending-on-autopilot proposal. Or the big-government plan from Senate Democrats.

So neither side will move the ball.

We’ll have some fiscal skirmishes, to be sure, with the debt limit and the FY2014 appropriations bills being obvious examples.

But nothing big will happen until either 2015 (if the Democrats win control of the House) or 2017 (if Republicans win the White House and control of the Senate).

By then, we’ll be two or fours years closer to being the next Greece.

P.S. Actually, I think many other nations are in a position to be the next Greece, though it’s discouraging that some estimates indicate that our long-run fiscal status is worse than basket cases such as Italy and France.

P.P.S. As these cartoons suggest, maybe our real fiscal problem is that the President refuses to admit there’s a problem?

P.P.P.S. But I think this cartoon more accurately shows our real challenge.

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Why We Should Be Optimistic about Repealing Obamacare and Fixing the Healthcare System

I’m going to make an assertion that seems utterly absurd.

The enactment of Obamacare may have been good news.

Before sending a team of medical attendants to cart me off to a sanitarium, allow me to elaborate. I’m not saying Obamacare is good policy. After all, I’ve written over and over again that it is a budget-busting boondoggle that will exacerbate our real healthcare crisis of third-party payer.

What I am saying, though, is that Obamacare may turn out to be a major political mistake for the left, one that sets the stage for sweeping free market reforms.

Here’s my six-part hypothesis.

1. Our healthcare system as a mess before Obamacare. Normal market forces were crippled by government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and also undermined by government intervention in the tax code that resulted in pervasive over-insurance that exacerbated the third-party payer problem.
2. These various forms of intervention led to all sorts of problems, such as rising prices and indecipherable complexity, and most people blamed that the “free market” and “private” healthcare.
3. Obamacare was enacted in 2010, and it was perceived to be a paradigm-shifting change in the healthcare system, even though it was just another layer of bad policy on top of lots of other bad policy. Immediately after the legislation was approved, I offered a rough estimate that we went from a system that was 68 percent dictated by government to one that was 79 percent dictated by government.
4. Not surprisingly, all of the same problems still exist, but now they’re exacerbated by the mistakes in Obamacare.
5. But because people think we’ve had a paradigm shift and government now is in charge (pay attention, since this is my key argument), they will be much more likely to blame “Obamacare” and “government” for all the warts and inefficiencies of the healthcare system.
6. This means the public will be more receptive to pro-market policies, such as Obamacare repeal, tax reforms to reduce over-insurance, as well as the Medicaid and Medicare reforms in the Ryan budget.

All this will be much easier said than done, of course, and it is disconcerting that we’ll probably have to rely on feckless Republicans to implement these reforms.

But at least there’s a plausible scenario for systemic reform, and that wasn’t the case before Obamacare was enacted. In other words, the President’s signature achievement may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory for the left.

P.S. Watch this excellent video from Reason TV to see how a genuine free market could deliver health care at lower cost and with greater efficiency. For another example, here’s a report from North Carolina on free-market healthcare in action.

P.P.S. This post is part of my let’s-be-optimistic series. Previous editions include:

• The fiscal cliff was a smaller loss than I expected.
• The sequester was a real victory.
• We have good evidence that the Tea Party has made a positive difference.
• The Democratic-controlled Senate rejected a permanent expansion of funds for the IMF.
• The burden of government fiscal policy has been reduced since the 2010 elections.
• The Democrat-controlled Senate approved dynamic scoring.

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