Step Away From the Fiscal Cliff

In the coming months the same president and largely the same Congress will try to fix the same problem: How to bring the $1.1 trillion federal deficit and $11.3 trillion public debt under control. More immediately, they need to avoid the brutal automatic cuts and tax hikes that will take place in January unless President Obama and congressional Republicans can reach some sort of deal. Although Republicans and Democrats persist in making it seem like bringing spending in line with revenue is some form of particle physics, there’s actually no mystery to the calculations. The money will come out of the nation’s $2 trillion entitlement programs. It will come out of the Pentagon’s $680 billion budget. And it will come from tax increases. There will be plenty of arguing over what to cut. There’s no arguing where the money is.

Except, of course, in Washington. Even after the failed 2011 debt negotiations set the country on course to this fiscal cliff, Republicans insist that the savings can be found elsewhere, no military cuts or tax hikes necessary. Paul Ryan, still the chair of the House Budget Committee—he lost the vice presidency but won an eighth congressional term with 55 percent of the vote in his district—has proposed, over the next 10 years, to cut in half the “nonsecurity discretionary spending” that makes up the rest of the federal budget. “That sounds OK until you start to look at what’s there,” says Philip Joyce, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy who spent five years with the Congressional Budget Office. “You’re talking Commerce, you’re talking NOAA, the weather service, the Economic Development Administration … they do real things.”