When you’re having a hard time paying for your lunch, the solution is to stop buying so much food.

Mark accuses me of imagining a free lunch in my post “Spending Till Kingdom Come While Raising Taxes Would Also End Badly.” That was in response to Mark’s initial post “Spending Till Kingdom Come While Cutting Taxes Will End Badly.”

As the headlines of these posts suggest, neither of us is seeing good things in the U.S. fiscal future. It would be free-lunch thinking if I had said tax cuts completely pay for themselves, deficit spending is basically free because we’re lending to ourselves, or we don’t have to worry about the debt because the government can always print money to make up the difference. These are arguments that people have made in the past to justify fiscal recklessness, they are wrong, and I do not make any of them.

The national debt is probably the largest public-policy problem facing the U.S. The Republicans’ recent law does not help to solve it. Both parties have promised to ignore the problem, and they are keeping their word.

I agree with Mark on all of this, so I don’t see how I’m arguing for a free lunch. Mark gives this one-sentence summary of his point:

I am arguing, however, that when there’s a debt that’s been incurred, it has to be paid, and that it’s prudent and necessary to pay it down rather than adding to that debt through further uncontrolled borrowing while at the same time reducing revenue intake.

I agree with that as well. My point was that as a share of the economy, federal revenue intake is not declining and is instead stable at a historically normal level of around 17 to 18 percent of GDP. That should be good enough for the federal government, and that should be the conservative position.

The problem is the spending. I don’t want to rewrite what I said before; go read the post linked above if you missed it. Mark says, “Dominic would choose low taxes even if it’s combined with uncontrolled, foolish spending.” I would. I’m under no illusion that that is good for the deficit. It’s not a free lunch. It stinks to high heaven. But the problem is the uncontrolled, foolish spending.

I want low taxes and low spending, and so does Mark. I’m saying, relative to other rich countries, the U.S. is halfway there. Mark is saying it might be time to throw out the successful half of the equation because the failed half is so bad. I reject that.

Acquiescing to major tax hikes to close the deficit — and they would have to be huge — is also conceding that the government should be as big as it is. That this is the government that we as Americans deserve. And that should not be the conservative position. It already is the left’s position.

What tax increases would Mark propose to pay for the absurd levels of federal spending? For example, to make Social Security solvent, the payroll tax rate would have to rise from 12.4 percent to 16.7 percent, a 35 percent increase. That’s a crazy tax hike on working people to fund benefits for retired people that they did not earn and in many cases do not need. That’s unfair and immoral, just as passing on the debt to future generations is unfair and immoral.

Medicare’s fiscal situation is even worse, with premiums and the payroll tax combining to fund only half of the program’s costs last year, and costs are expected to rise basically forever. It’s not even possible to hike taxes basically forever to pay those costs.

(To be clear, I strongly oppose the enhanced standard deduction for seniors that Republicans just passed. That is a completely reckless tax cut with no economic benefit, and it is probably the worst part of an overall disappointing law.)

Conservative ideology aside, as I noted in my earlier post, fiscal reforms have to start with spending in order to work. That’s the learned experience from other countries whose budgets finally burst. So even if large tax increases weren’t part of the left’s agenda, they still wouldn’t be effective to ultimately solve the problem.

Plenty of people out there believe in a free lunch, but I’m not one of them. I’m just saying that when you’re having a hard time paying for your lunch, and your lunch is five steaks, a pound of fries, and a bottle of expensive wine, the solution is to stop buying so much food.