Thursday, January 3, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez Wants Congress to Stop Pretending to Pay for Its Spending

Get used to reading more storylines like this over the next two years: The left hand doesn’t know what the far-left hand is doing.

On Wednesday, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) faced a potential revolt from within her own party. Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and several progressive allies threatened to vote against the rules package governing congressional procedures on the first day of the new Congress Thursday, because of proposed changes they believe would threaten their ability to pass single-payer health care.

What’s Going On?

Ocasio-Cortez and her allies object to Pelosi’s attempt to reinstate Pay-as-You-Go (PAYGO) rules for the new 116th Congress. Put simply, those rules would require that any legislation the House considers not increase the deficit over five- and ten-year periods. In short, this policy would mean that any bill proposing new mandatory spending or revenue reductions must pay for those changes via offsetting tax increases and/or spending cuts—hence the name.

Under Republican control, the House had a policy requiring spending increases—but not tax cuts—to be paid for. Pelosi would overturn that policy and apply PAYGO to both the spending and the revenue side of the ledger.

Progressives object to Pelosi’s attempt to constrain government spending, whether in the form of additional fiscal “stimulus” or a single-payer health system.

However, Pelosi’s spokesman countered with a statement indicating that the progressives’ move “is a vote to let Mick Mulvaney make across-the-board cuts.” Mulvaney heads the Office of Management and Budget, which would implement any sequester under statutory PAYGO.

Regardless of what the new House decides regarding its own procedures for considering bills, Pay-as-You-Go remains on the federal statute books. Democrats re-enacted it in 2010, just prior to Obamacare’s passage. If legislation Congress passed  violates those statutory PAYGO requirements (as opposed to any internal House rules), it will trigger mandatory spending reductions via the sequester—the “across-the-board cuts” to which Pelosi’s spokesman referred.

To Pay for Spending—Or Not?

Progressives think reinstituting PAYGO would impose fiscal constraints hindering their ability to pass massive new spending legislation. However, the reality does not match the rhetoric from Ocasio-Cortez and others. Consider, for instance, just some of the ways a Democratic Congress “paid for” the more than $1.8 trillion in new spending on Obamacare:

  • A CLASS Act that even some Democrats called “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would have been proud of,” and which never went into effect because the Obama administration could not implement it in a fiscally sustainable manner;
  • Double counting the Medicare savings in the legislation as “both” improving the solvency of Medicare and paying for the new spending in Obamacare;
  • Payment reductions that the non-partisan Medicare actuary considers extremely unlikely to be sustainable, and which could cause more than half of hospitals and nursing homes to become unprofitable within a generation;
  • Tax increases that Congress has repeatedly delayed, and which could end up never going into effect.

A Bipartisan Spending Addiction

An external observer weighing the Part D and Obamacare examples would find it difficult to determine the less dishonest approach to fiscal policy. It reinforces that America’s representatives have a bipartisan addiction to more government spending, and a virtually complete unwillingness to make tough choices now, instead bequeathing massive (and growing) amounts of debt to the next generation.

In that sense, Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow progressives should feel right at home in the new Congress. Republicans may criticize her for proposing new spending, but the difference between her and most GOP members represents one of degree rather than of kind. Therein lies the problem: In continuing to spend with reckless abandon, Congress is merely debating how quickly to sink our country’s fiscal ship.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.