Come on, Let's Spend Again

There's an old saying about politicians that they come to Washington promising to clean up the swamp but then discover it's really a hot tub - and jump right in.

So here we go again with a pattern at least since the early Reagan years. Republicans seize back power in the elections from big spending Democrats by promising to lasso out-of-control government, and to their credit, for a while they do just that.

Then they start to settle in to power, feel comfortable with their new perches of authority and it's a return to spending as usual. The water's nice.

This happened in the early Reagan years when the Gipper's first budgets were tight-fisted and bold. Domestic spending and the welfare state were reined in for a while. That lasted about three years and then spending and even taxes were raised by Republicans.

Then in the Republican Revolution of 1994 when Newt Gingrich and the GOP took over both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years, spending was flattened in 1995, 1996, and1997, and surpluses emerged. But by 2000 spending accelerated again during the Bush years.

Now fast forward to today. I have been one of the biggest cheerleaders for the GOP's spending controls under the sequester process. For the first time since the 1950s, federal spending fell for three years in a row. As a share of GDP, federal outlays collapsed from 23.5 percent in 2010 to 20.3 percent of GDP in 2014. So spending as a share of GDP was about one-half trillion dollars lower as a share of GDP by 2014 than if the Obama spending track record had continued.

That's an impressive record of fiscal discipline and John Boehner and Mitch McConnell don't get the credit they deserve for masterminding the sequester process at a time when the White House has been occupied by the most liberal president since the 1950s.

So what happened? ?In the last 18 months the trend has reversed course. Twice already the Republicans have modified the sequester spending caps to make room for more program funding. And that happened not because Democrats wanted to spend more, which, of course, they did. It happened because a growing band of Republicans wanted to raid the Treasury.

The excuse was that we needed to spend more on military programs, but an increasing number of pro-spending Republicans wanted to feed the beast of social programs and brick-and-mortar programs as well.

As Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the fiscal hawks in the House and the leader of the new Freedom Caucus tells me, "One of the biggest problem we face now is getting our own members to vote to control spending."

Here's the evidence. So far in this fiscal year (October through April) federal spending has exploded by another $133 billion, or a jack rabbit sprint of 7 percent.

Admittedly, $46 billion of this higher "spending" is artificially due to less money coming into the Treasury from repayments from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Still, domestic outlays are growing about twice the 2 percent rate of inflation.

If the trend continues through September, then federal spending will rise by $171 billion this year - and that assumes no hurricanes, floods, military emergencies, and so one. Spending is expected to rise by another $250 billion in 2016. The figure shows the reversal of fortune.

Meanwhile, Citizens Against Government Waste finds oinker earmarks are finding their way back into the budget.

Yet there's still an attitude that spending is tight. Rep. Kay Granger, a Republican from Texas told The Hill: "We're living with just really low numbers without any wiggle room, any flexibility."?

Really?

The biggest expenditure increases are for Obamacare, including the taxpayer subsidized exchange subsidies. Those costs are up just a shade under 30 percent in one year. Medicare costs are up 8.1 percent.

Wait a minute. Didn't Barack Obama promise the Affordable Care Act would bend the cost curve DOWN?

Republican security hawks thought they would get an equal amount of extra defense spending ?for each dollar of domestic program increases. That hasn't happened this year. So far Pentagon outlays are coming in lower than last year. This means ALL of the spending hikes have been for domestic agencies that are the pet programs of the Left.

Despite the Mount Everest $18 trillion national debt, ?interest payments on serving the debt are also running slightly lower this year. That, of course, is because of very low interest rates on Treasury bonds.

But if these rates begin to rise to normal levels, interest costs will begin to soar again. We may be living on borrowed money and borrowed time.

When these ugly budget numbers come fully to light, there are going to be a lot of mighty angry conservative voters. A Republican House and Senate has overloaded the federal budget with record-spending levels.

It's going to be hard to blame that on Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi. Republicans say they are going to balance the budget in 10 years. Good luck with that. So far this year they haven't been able to discipline themselves for just four months.

*Stephen Moore is an economics contributor to CBN and author of "Who's the Fairest of them All," Encounter Books.