WAIT TO SEE

Today the Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial spoke a truth that should be worked into every conversation – argument – about the fiscal cliff, sequestration and the general state of federal budgeting.

“Since 1974,”  it said, “Capitol Hill’s ‘baseline’ has automatically increased spending every year according to Congressional Budget Office projections, which mean before anyone has submitted a budget or cast a single vote. Tax and spending changes are then measured off that inflated baseline, not in absolute terms.”

In other words, cuts in proposed federal spending are no such things; cuts are smaller increases in spending.

With such “cuts” budgets can never, never shrink. Revenue can never be grown to catch up with the spending.

Whenever a politician utters the word “cut” he or she should be challenged.

Reporters and pundits never ask politicians about that truth. Certainly, never is the president asked to explain.

Roughly, in recent fiscal years, our governmental keepers (take that in any sense and it now seems to fit) the tax collectors take in something like 2 trillion dollars but the lawmakers spend 3 trillion. The total gross national product is roughly 15 trillion. Thirteen percent should be enough to buy whatever kind of government the nation needs, rather than 20 percent. Actually, the feds are now spending something like 23-25 percent of GDP rather than the 19-20 percent, which has been considered fairly normal in recent history. Add in state and local taxes as well as fees and other governmental extractions from the common pocketbook, and no wonder the burden is becoming unbearable.

And, of course, the national debt is more than 16.5 trillion dollars, which surpasses the GDP. That staggering debt that cannot be described in understandable terms except by astronomers talking with other astronomers about universal distances, so how can voters be made to understand that more spending is not the answer?

Warnings about the inevitable consequences seem of no avail. As Nancy Pelosi said about the Affordable Care Act before it became law: It will have to pass before you can know what’s in it. As ObamaCare is shaping up as it becomes effective, it ain’t affordable.

Thomas Paine, the Englishman who fomented the American Revolution, wrote in the introduction to his history-changing pamphlet Common Sense, “Time makes more converts than reason.”

Maybe the country will have to plunge over the cliff before its fate becomes clear. Politicians don’t learn without bruises.