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Hear that rattling sound? It’s the can being kicked down the road. Congress and the Administration passed the “Budget Control Act of 2011” to avert the immediate debt crisis. The problem is, 70% of the spending reductions in the bill are not scheduled to occur until 2017 to 2021. Will Congressional Representatives, at that time, honor those reductions, or will they override them? Regardless, the reduction in spending will be swallowed-up many times over by Government budgeting processes in the next 10 years and our National Debt will increase many trillions of dollars because of Baseline Budgeting. This budgeting is a process that Congresses have used for decades to increase spending annually by 8%, whether it is warranted or not. The cumulative and compounding effect of each $1.00 in Government budgeting today extrapolates to $2.16 in budgeting and spending in ten years, thanks to Baseline Budgeting.
Congress automatically increases its budgeting and spending power by 8% each year. Senior Citizens cannot manage to get a 3% Cost Of Living increase in their Social Security checks.
Congress is so accustomed to 8% budget increases that whenever there is any attempt to increase budgets by LESS than their 8% standard, liberals refer to it as a CUT (e.g. a 7% increase would be referred to as a 1% cut).
Baseline Budgeting is the enemy of fiscal sanity. We need real budgeting, with Government required to justify its current budgets and any proposed increases.
Doug Riley
Loveland, Colorado