A Chinese adage says: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
With that in mind, we hail the pledge of the new Democratic leaders of the House and Senate to reinstate the “pay as you go” rule when they take over the new 110th Congress that convenes Thursday.
That rule was in effect during the Clinton administration. It required, as long as the federal budget was in deficit, that any tax cut or increase in spending on so-called “entitlement” programs be offset by an increase in other taxes or reduction in other entitlement spending, rather than being added to the torrent of red ink now inundating the federal Treasury.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, reinstating what Washington calls the “paygo” rule at least signals that Congress understands “budgeting requires tradeoffs and that tax cuts or entitlement increases that are worth enacting are worth paying for.”
The Post has long supported the paygo rule and would go further by adopting the suggestion of a bipartisan group of congressional budget leaders that the Bush administration include the full costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan military operations in its regular budget submissions.
So far, the administration has funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now heading into their fifth and sixth years respectively, by means of “emergency” supplemental appropriations.
We’re not opposed to such supplementals for genuinely unforeseeable costs, such as the possible tab for sending 20,000 or 30,000 soldiers to Iraq to reinforce the 140,000 now serving there. But it is long past time that the basic, and foreseeable, costs of those conflicts be included in the fundamental budget process.
The Iraq Study Group urged giving taxpayers just such an honest accounting of the war’s costs in its recent report. One of the group’s 79 recommendations called for the president’s annual budget request to include full costs for the war, noting that “the normal budget process should not be circumvented.”
In a recent letter to the president, Senate Budget Committee chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., incoming Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and incoming House Budget Committee chairman John Spratt, D-S.C., criticized the supplemental appropriations process, concluding that its overuse “has skewed deficit projections, minimized the rational tradeoffs in the budget, and obscured oversight of war costs.”
We firmly agree. The first steps on the long road back to fiscal responsibility in Washington clearly involve accurately calculating the costs of those programs, military or civilian, now eating up the budget.
