Any government that wants to get its budget under control must commit to constraining spending, first and foremost. Republicans have failed to do this.

I share Mark’s disappointment with the lack of spending cuts in the Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law. The lack of leadership from Trump or congressional Republicans on the nation’s terrible fiscal health will indeed pass a massive debt burden on to future generations, as Mark says.

This is hardly new for Republicans, of course, who always talk a big game about cutting spending but don’t follow through when in power. As the NR editors pointed out after the bill passed Congress on Thursday, the Republican Study Committee budget proposal from last year would have cut $17 trillion in spending over the next ten years, but the actual budget resolution only called for cutting $1.5 trillion over ten years. This should be embarrassing, but Washington politicians seem incapable of embarrassment.

Mark is also correct that plenty of blame lies with the voters. They keep electing leaders who promise to not fix the problem. The median voter wants high spending and low taxes, and that’s more or less what the U.S. has. Democracy’s working, which is bad for the budget. “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else,” Frédéric Bastiat wrote.

I wrote a whole piece making many points similar to Mark’s in the November 2024 issue of NR. Both parties are promising to be reckless, and they’re true to their word. That’s bad for America.

Mark says he’d rather cut spending too, but then he says “if we won’t do that, I’d rather we raise enough revenue to pay for our addiction to consumption and entitlement spending, because, if we don’t, we’ll likely suffer a worse result down the road than a return to the tax code of FY 2016.”

He continues:

Many on the right will say that “America has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” I disagree. I think we have a responsibility problem and a sanity problem. If the American people insist — as they do through their representatives in Congress, year after year — that the feds spend something like $7 trillion annually, then they should insist on raising something like $7 trillion annually in taxes.

To the extent that the U.S. has a revenue problem, it pales in comparison to the spending problem. This chart from Jessica (formerly Brian) Riedl at the Manhattan Institute shows projected federal revenue assuming the 2017 tax cuts were extended (which they were) and projected federal spending assuming the scheduled cuts don’t take place (which they usually don’t), both as a percentage of GDP:

So even with the tax cuts extended, federal revenue is forecast to be stable as a share of the economy for the foreseeable future. The level at which it is stable is within the historically normal range of 17 to 18 percent of GDP. (One of the remarkable things about federal tax policy is how stable that percentage is despite major changes in the tax code.) It’s spending that is rising out of control, far beyond the historical norm outside of recessions or wars.

It is true, as a simple matter of arithmetic, that raising taxes is just as much a solution to this problem as cutting spending. But it’s up to conservatives to say that the federal government shouldn’t continue to grow as a share of the economy.

Of course government spending will increase in nominal terms over time as inflation and population growth lead to more costs. But there is no reason that government must take up a bigger and bigger portion of the economy over time. That’s a choice, and it’s one that conservatives should reject.

That includes not acquiescing to higher taxation to fund bigger government. The U.S. has a lower tax burden for most people than other rich countries do. That’s a good thing, something conservatives should seek to conserve and have been effective at conserving for the past several decades.

The relatively low middle-class tax burden separates the U.S. from the cradle-to-grave welfare model that has failed in other rich countries. Plenty of them have already faced their own fiscal crises, and the ones that recovered from them most effectively focused on spending cuts rather than tax increases. Ireland, Sweden, and Canada all got their debts under control with only modest tax hikes and much more significant spending cuts. Changing the budget-making processes and imposing fiscal rules helped make the spending reforms stick. The U.S. should follow their example, except it should reform spending before the inevitable crisis forces the issue.

As Milton Friedman said, spending, not taxes, is the real cost of government. Any government that wants to get its budget under control must credibly commit to constraining spending, first and foremost. Republicans have failed to do this, and that’s a bad thing. That doesn’t make tax increases good.