Reckless and Irresponsible: Trump Is Making Big Government Even Bigger

Way back in early 2016, I asked whether Donald Trump believed in smaller government.

A few months later, I concluded that the answer was no. Trump – like Bush and Nixon – was a big-government Republican.

I wish that I was wrong.

But if you look at the budget deal he approved last year, there’s no alternative explanation. Especially since there was an approach that would have guaranteed a victory for taxpayers.

Now it appears that he is on the verge of meekly surrendering to another big expansion of the federal budget.

The Washington Post has a story on the new deal to increase spending.

…the final details of a sweeping budget and debt deal are unlikely to include many — if any — actual spending cuts… The agreement appeared likely to mark a retreat for White House officials who had demanded major spending cuts in exchange for a new budget deal. …instead of the $150 billion in new spending cuts recently demanded by White House acting budget director Russell Vought, the agreement would include a significantly lower amount of reductions. And those reductions aren’t expected to represent actual spending cuts, in part because most would take place in future years and likely be reversed by Congress at a later date. …In practical terms, the budget agreement would increase spending by tens of billions of dollars in the next two years, a stark reversal from the White House’s budget request several months ago… Agreeing on new spending levels also avoids onerous budget caps that would otherwise snap into place automatically under an Obama-era deal, and indiscriminately slash $126 billion from domestic and Pentagon budgets.

The establishment-oriented Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is aghast at the grotesque profligacy of the purported agreement.

…this agreement is a total abdication of fiscal responsibility by Congress and the President. It may end up being the worst budget agreement in our nation’s history, proposed at a time when our fiscal conditions are already precarious. If this deal passes, President Trump will have increased discretionary spending by as much as 22 percent over his first term… There was a time when Republicans insisted on a dollar of spending cuts for every dollar increase in the debt limit. It’s hard to believe they are now considering the opposite – attaching $2 trillion of spending increases to a similar-sized debt limit hike.

I sometimes differ with the folks at the CRFB because they’re too fixated on debt rather than the size of government.

But in this case, we both find this rumored deal to be utterly irresponsible.

From a liberty-minded perspective, the Wall Street Journal opines about the spendthrift agreement.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin are negotiating another spending blowout as part of a two-year budget deal, and let’s hope the talks break down. The price could be another $2 trillion in deficit spending… The Budget Control Act of 2011 puts caps on spending that both parties have to agree to lift. In 2018 Congress passed a two-year budget deal that blew out domestic spending by more than $130 billion in exchange for a buildup in defense. The bipartisan spending party is hoping to repeat the exercise for fiscal 2020 and 2021… After the last two-year deal Mr. Trump vowed never to sign another one, but here he is again. …The GOP may…underestimate the political cost of campaigning on another spending deal that increases the size of government. It will be harder to run against the spending plans of Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris with Mr. Trump’s first-term spending record.

I’ll close with a chart I prepared based on the numbers for domestic discretionary spending from the Mid-Session Review, as well as Table 8.1 from the Historical Tables, both from the Office of Management and Budget.

The numbers show that we had more fiscal restraint under Obama (blue line) than Trump (orange line). And Trump’s numbers will now be even worse with the new deal.

I added the Excel-generated trendline to show what would have happened if Obama-era policies were maintained.

But since that produced an unrealistic assessment, I also showed (green line) what spending would have looked like if politicians had obeyed commitments from the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA).

Some of these numbers are back-of-the-envelope calculations, but the bottom line is clear. Trump is worse than Obama on spending.

And that means big tax increases inevitably will be the result.

P.S. When I recently issued a report card for Trump’s economic policy, I gave him a “B-” because I decided his good tax policy outweighed his bad spending policy. If this deal gets finalized, he drops to a “C-” because of the big expansion in the burden of spending.

P.P.S. Trump also is weak on entitlement spending, which is the biggest part of the federal spending burden.