The Great Debate

It won’t be easy for President Obama to do big things in his second term, with Congress still divided. Yet one legacy-caliber goal is easily within reach: Obama can restore fiscal balance without deep spending cuts by doing, well, nothing. By simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year, for everyone, and vetoing all future tax cuts, the president would leave office in four years with America’s fiscal house largely in order while ensuring a strong federal government for years to come.

Economists predict that allowing the U.S. to go over the “fiscal cliff” would produce a mild recession, and they are probably right. But with signs pointing to a slow yet steady recovery, that downturn would likely be short-lived and worth the longer term gain of achieving fiscal stability without taking a meat clever to key government programs.

Obama promised on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t raise taxes on the middle class and implied that repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would yield enough revenue. In fact, more than three-quarters of all revenue lost by the U.S. Treasury because of the Bush tax cuts is due to cuts that benefit households making under $250,000, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Simple math suggests that as long as the vast majority of earners are paying the lowest tax rates in half a century, it will be hard to tame the deficit without deep spending cuts.

Forcing such spending reductions, of course, was a key goal of the Bush tax cuts – which stand as the crown jewel accomplishment of small-government conservatives over the past two decades. If Obama lets the bulk of these tax cuts stand in his second term, he will grant a permanent victory to that movement and its agenda of steadily downsizing a range of federal programs.

To be sure, middle-class families are struggling, and higher taxes would be painful. Yet those Americans further down the economic ladder – the bottom 30 percent of households – are hurting far worse. If taxes on the middle class don’t go up, government spending for this group will face an unprecedented squeeze.

This essay was submitted through the Romney campaign as a response to Lawrence Summers’ most recent column, “This election, Obama is the wiser economic choice.”

The large budget deficits and expansion of the national debt under President Barack Obama, unprecedented since World War II, have him set to bequeath an immensely costly legacy. Each of his deficits as a percentage of gross domestic product has been larger than the previous post-World War II record, for which Democrats excoriated President Ronald Reagan. Between the debt already racked up and what Obama’s FY13 budget projects, each income-tax-paying family will owe more in Obama debt than a new mortgage on a median-priced home and four years of college costs.

Yet more than three years into recovery from the recession, the president has not proposed a program to deal with the massive debt. Indeed, he abandoned even the long-run goal of a balanced budget, adopting the much weaker goal of stabilizing the debt-GDP ratio at the higher projected FY2016 level. But he did not budget for it, appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission to propose how to do so, then ignored its recommendations. He has no serious proposals to deal with the even larger eventual long-run deficits in Social Security and Medicare, which total several times the current national debt. When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was asked by Congress what the administration’s plan was, he said, “We don’t have one.” Vice President Joe Biden guaranteed, “No changes to Social Security.”

There's something scary about big numbers. It's one reason we in the media often like to put the biggest number we can find into a headline.

So it was no surprise that most media outlets went gaga over the Obama administration's projection that the nation's debt will grow by $9 trillion over the next decade. And sure enough, critics of the administration's efforts to reform healthcare were quick to seize on that scary number as another reason to advocate doing nothing.

But without wading into the muck of the current debate over healthcare reform, it's worth taking stock of just how much hypocrisy there is when it comes to the subject of government spending and those big bad deficits.