James Pethokoukis drives the point home:
even with all the tax cuts extended, government revenue would still rise well above its historical average of roughly 18 percent since World War Two.
Instead, it’s historically unprecedented government spending that’s behind the projected debt explosion. As the CBO itself puts it:
As a result, revenues would grow only slightly faster than the economy, equaling 22 percent of GDP by 2080. Slowly growing revenues combined with sharply rising expenditures would create an explosive fiscal situation. Under the spending and revenue policies incorporated in this scenario, federal debt would surpass 100 percent of GDP in 2023 and exceed 200 percent of GDP by the late 2030s.
And although the Wagnerians think they are marching along with History, they somehow seem to have missed a generation of growing American skepticism about the size and scope of government, beginning with the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s. More recently, there’s been widespread revulsion at the Obama spending orgy and his monstrous deficits, evidenced by tea parties and polls today and perhaps by vote totals in November.
Let’s do our best that it does.
