Archives: August, 2011

Military Spending and the Budget Deal

By
Christopher A. Preble

The budget deal announced last night offers two sets of potential cuts in military spending.

The first set of potential cuts, created by the budget caps, target “security” spending. That includes the Pentagon, State, foreign aid, the Department of Homeland Security and Veterans (the discretionary portion of Veterans spending, to be precise). The deal caps “security” spending at $684 billion for this fiscal year and $686 for the next. That requires little pain; the 2012 security cap is only $5 billion below what we’ll spend on those categories in fiscal 2011. The White House claims that the caps will generate $350 billion in savings from base defense spending for ten years. They get there, dubiously, by projecting security spending at the capped level across the decade, even after the caps expire, and counting as savings the difference between that spending trajectory and what CBO now projects. They are also assuming that all the savings go to defense, even though Republicans will try to make the other security categories absorb the pain.

The second set of potential cuts, which occur automatically if the Joint Committee fails to reach its spending cut goals, target defense spending directly. This could add $500 billion in defense cuts over ten years, the White House says.

Assuming that is true, the maximum amount of defense cuts possible here is $850 billion. That is a cut of roughly 15 percent compared to planned spending based on the president’s February 2011 budget submission — not including the wars. It is roughly on par with the cuts proposed by the Bowles-Simpson Commission. The total savings are much lower, roughly half, if you compare the cuts to what we actually spend now, rather than the increases we were planning on in past planning documents.

And remember, that $850 billion is a maximum; it may not materialize. It will be lower, if, as hawks hope, the cuts fall on the non-defense elements of the security category. It will be lower if the Joint Committee finds other accounts to cut, avoiding the triggers.

Still, that possible amount is enough to make hawks apoplectic. We are sure to hear more complaints about “gutting or “hollowing out” the force. But let’s keep some facts about military spending in mind:

The Pentagon’s budget has more than doubled over the past decade, and current projections call for the Pentagon to receive more than $6 trillion from U.S. taxpayers through 2021. If its budget got cut by 15 percent, that would return us to roughly 2007 levels. That hardly seems like “gutting”. After such cuts, we would still account for more than 40 percent of global military spending, and our margin of military superiority over any combination of rivals would remain unrivaled.

The focus should now shift to strategy. The White House says the Pentagon’s ongoing roles and missions review will guide the first round of security cuts. The aim is to eliminate military capabilities that are unnecessary or provided by multiple services. We should go deeper, looking to what missions, allies, and possible wars, we can jettison.  The recommendations should guide not only the first set of cuts, but also the second. That means making recommendations for the Joint Committee on additional defense cuts and preparing for automatic cuts should they occur. There is nothing preventing those cuts from being achieved by retiring force structure required by needless missions—such as defending rich allies that can defend themselves.

We should also keep in mind that this deal hardly solves our deficit problem and does not exhaust the possible savings we should seek. Deeper military cuts are possible and could even enhance security given the right strategy.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics

Privacy Is Security

By
Julian Sanchez

Here’s a point that ought to seem obvious: “Security”—whether physical or electronic—is always a function of the thing you’re trying to secure. If I were to tell you that my Washington apartment has barred windows, an outer front gate, a deadbolt on the inner door, and an alarm system to boot, you’d probably say my home sounds highly secure. If I told you that the precise same measures were the complete security system for a bank, you’d laugh. The reason is obvious: Unless I finally push the NSA over the line, my apartment only needs to withstand attacks from local thugs. A bank’s security must be able to withstand assaults from seasoned teams of professional criminals who — with millions as a potential jackpot — may be willing to spend weeks in planning, take extraordinary personal risks, and “invest” thousands of dollars in burglary equipment or bribes to insiders. My Apple gadgets and comic book art — though precious to me — are unlikely to inspire such extraordinary expenditures of time, effort, and money. Put another way: My apartment is “secure” when my security system makes the risk-adjusted cost of a break-in attempt higher than the value of my stuff to a prospective burglar.

Many people don’t find this as obvious, however, in the context of data security—a point I allude to glancingly in a New York Post op-ed this morning that takes aim at a data retention mandate wending its way through Congress. If I started storing big piles of gold bullion and precious gems in my home, my previously highly secure apartment would suddenly become laughably insecure, without my changing my security measures at all. If a company significantly increases the amount of sensitive or valuable information stored in its systems — because, for example, a government mandate requires them to keep more extensive logs — then the returns to a single successful intrusion (as measured by the amount of data that can be exfiltrated before the breach is detected and sealed) increase as well. The costs of data retention need to be measured not just in terms of terabytes, or man hours spend reconfiguring routers. The cost of detecting and repelling a higher volume of more sophisticated attacks has to be counted as well.

One very simple security measure a company can practice, then, is to simply avoid retaining enough data to attract the interest of the most skilled professionals (or, alternatively, those willing to hire out botnets to aid their attacks). Because the adequacy of a security system is always a function of the payoff of breach to the attacker, then, privacy is an important component of security, as well as a value worth respecting for its own sake.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Telegraph Messengers, Elevator Operators and the Connecticut Economy

By
Walter Olson

Attorney/blogger Daniel Schwartz notes that even as the state of Connecticut continues to enact new labor laws at a hectic pace – from obligatory employer-paid sick leave, a first-of-its-kind law, to new curbs on consideration of workers’ credit records in hiring – it seldom gets around to repealing any of the obsolete old ones, such as its laws regulating the working conditions of telegraph messengers and elevator operators and saying disabled persons need a doctor’s note to accept night-time work in stores and restaurants. Because more law equals better law, right?

Not at all by coincidence, the New Haven Register noted ruefully in February that Connecticut has had zero job growth since 1990 and that the state “is projected to have the lowest national job growth rate — less than 1 percent — through 2016, according to IHS Global Insight, a New York economic analysis company.” At this rate, Connecticut is going to need every telegraph messenger and elevator operator job it can get. Is it any wonder the country is looking elsewhere – and in particular to states like Texas – for policy leadership?

Topics: 
General, Regulatory Studies

Budget Deal Doesn’t Cut Spending

By
Chris Edwards

Republicans and Democrats have come together on a “historic” budget deal that cuts federal spending by more than $2 trillion over 10 years. The Washington Post’s lead story calls the cuts “sharp” and “severe.”

However, the budget deal doesn’t cut federal spending at all.

House Speaker John Boehner’s bullet points on the deal say that it cuts discretionary spending by $917 billion over 10 years, as “certified by CBO.” These discretionary “cuts” appear to be the same as those in Boehner’s plan from last week. The chart shows CBO’s scoring of those spending cuts (see here and here).

Wait a minute, those bars are rising! Spending isn’t being cut at all.  The “cuts” in the deal are only cuts from the CBO “baseline,” which is a Washington construct of ever-rising spending. And even these “cuts” from the baseline include $156 billion of interest savings, which are imaginary because the underlying cuts are imaginary.

No program or agency terminations are identified in the deal. None of the vast armada of federal subsidies are targeted for elimination. Old folks will continue to gorge themselves on inflated benefits paid for by young families and future generations. None of Senator Tom Coburn’s or Senator Rand Paul’s specific cuts were included.

The federal government will still run a deficit of $1 trillion next year. This deal will “cut” the 2012 budget of $3.6 trillion by just $22 billion, or less than 1 percent.

The legislation does create a “Joint Committee” to design a second round of at least $1.2 trillion in spending cuts by November. Presumably, interest savings will be included in those “cuts” as well, reducing the amount of actual program cuts needed to about $1 trillion.

Will these Joint Committee cuts be real? This deal’s immediate cuts aren’t real, nor were many of the cuts in the 2011 budget deal earlier this year. It won’t be hard by the Joint Committee to manufacture $1 trillion in pretend savings in coming months.

Topics: 
General

A Deal, Not a Solution

By
Michael D. Tanner

The deal that President Obama and congressional leaders may well be the best deal that Republicans could get – and any deal that makes Paul Krugman this apoplectic can’t be all bad – but it should not be considered a solution to our fiscal problems.  

In the face of a $1.1 trillion budget deficit, a $14.3 trillion official debt, and a real indebtedness of more than $120 trillion, the deal would reduce the baseline increase in planned spending initially by about $1 trillion, or an average of roughly $100 billion per year – less than the federal government will borrow this month.   Moreover, the cuts are unspecific – apparently Congress still can’t find actual programs to eliminate – raising the specter that it will employ the same budgetary gimmicks as the Continuing Resolution last May, that promised $61 billion in cuts and delivered less than $8 billion.  Any cuts that do occur are simply reductions in baseline increases, not actual year-over-year reductions.  And most cuts are pushed far out into the future when they may or may not materialize.

The plan also creates a “”supercommittee – there’s an original idea – to propose an additional $1.2-1.7 trillion in spending cuts or tax increases, but few Washington observers expect it to be able to reach an agreement that could actually pass Congress.   Of course, in theory, if that happens, there would be automatic cuts of about $1.2 trillion, split equally between domestic programs and defense.   However, those cuts would not go into effect until 2013, after the next election.  Since the current Congress cannot bind future Congresses, it’s entirely possible – even likely – that those cuts will be rewritten, reduced, or done away with altogether.   Certainly there is no reason why we should count on them occurring.

The net result of this deal is that – if every penny of the proposed cuts actually occurs – our official national debt will rise to about $20 trillion by 2020.  That it otherwise would have reached $23 trillion is scant comfort.  With our country careening toward a fiscal cliff, Congress has chosen to tap on the breaks, not change direction. 

More troubling, the deal fails to deal with entitlement reform.   It is Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that are driving this country towards insolvency, but this plan does not include any structural reform of these programs.   They are exempt from the first round of cuts, and the level of cuts that can be proposed by the supercommittee are far too small to encompass anything like the Medicare reforms that Paul Ryan proposed early this year.   And both Social Security and Medicaid are exempt from the across-the-board cuts that kick in if the committee’s cuts do not occur.  In that case Medicare would be trimmed, but only in terms of further reductions in reimbursements to providers.

Certainly, this deal could have been worse.  There are no tax increases (yet).  There are at least theoretical cuts in spending.   We’ve moved a long way from when President Obama proposed an increase in spending as part of his 2012 budget.  But no one should pretend that we’ve put our fiscal house in order.

 

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

Debt Deals and the Default Myth

By
David Boaz

At the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog I take a look at the media drumbeat on “default”:

The establishment media have been waving around the word “default” like a bloody shirt, trying desperately to pressure the Tea Party Republicans to give in and raise the debt ceiling already. Both theNew York Times and the Washington Post on Sunday had “default” in the first sentence on the front page. Saturday’s Post featured “default” in the first line on its homepage, in the first sentence on page 1, in the first economy/business story, and on page 1 of the Real Estate section. Friday’s CBS Evening News began, “Tonight, we are almost out of time. That was President Obama’s warning as Congress groped for a way to avoid a government default.”

But there will be no default.

As a couple of graphs show, the problem is out-of-control spending and debt.

I talked to a journalist on Thursday who was very concerned about the “dysfunction” in Washington. So am I. But I told her that the real problem is not the dysfunctional process that’s getting all the headlines, but the dysfunctional substance of governance. Congress and the president will work out the debt ceiling issue, if not by Tuesday, then by next Tuesday. The real dysfunction is a federal budget that has doubled in 10 years, an annual deficit of some $1.5 trillion, and a national debt bursting through its statutory limit of $14.3 trillion and approaching 70 percent of GDP.

So will there be any budget cuts? All the deals being discussed in recent days

promise to cut spending some day—not this year, not next year, but swear to God some time in the next ten years. As the White Queen said to Alice, ”Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Cuts tomorrow and cuts in the out-years—but never cuts today.

Read it all.

 

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

Deconstructing the Revenue Side of the Debt-Ceiling Deal: Yes, There’s a Real Threat of Higher Taxes

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

Politicians last night announced the framework of a deal to increase the debt limit. In addition to authorizing about $900 billion more red ink right away, it would require immediate budget cuts of more than $900 billion, though “immediate” means over 10 years and “budget cuts” means spending still goes up (but not as fast as previously planned).

But that’s the relatively uncontroversial part. The fighting we’re seeing today revolves around a “super-committee” that’s been created to find $1.5 trillion of additional “deficit reduction” over the next 10 years (based on Washington math, of course).

And much of the squabbling deals with whether the super-committee is a vehicle for higher taxes. As with all kiss-your-sister budget deals, both sides can point to something they like.

Here’s what Republicans like:

The super-committee must use the “current law” baseline, which assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire at the end of 2012. But why are GOPers happy about this, considering they want those tax cuts extended? For the simple reason that Democrats on the super-committee therefore can’t use repeal of the “Bush tax cuts for the rich” as a revenue raiser.

Here’s what Democrats like:

There appears to be nothing in the agreement to preclude the super-committee from meeting its $1.5 trillion target with tax revenue. The 2001 and 2003 tax legislation is not an option, but everything else is on the table (notwithstanding GOP claims that it is “impossible for Joint Committee to increase taxes”).

In other words, there is a risk of tax hikes, just as I warned last week. Indeed, the five-step scenario I outlined last week needs to be modified because now a tax-hike deal would be “vital” to not only “protect” the nation from alleged default, but also to forestall the “brutal” sequester that might take place in the absence of an agreement.

But you don’t have to believe me. Just read the fact sheet distributed by the White House, which is filled with class warfare rhetoric about “shared sacrifice.”

This doesn’t mean there will be tax increases, of course, and this doesn’t mean Boehner and McConnell gave up more than Obama, Reid and Pelosi.

But as someone who assumes politicians will do the wrong thing whenever possible, it’s always good to identify the worst-case scenario and then prepare to explain why it’s not a good idea.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

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