WASHINGTON — The Concord Coalition today urged the House of Representatives to
reject the The Financial Freedom Act of 1999 (H.R. 2488) because it relies too heavily on
projections of huge future budget surpluses that are unlikely to materialize, and because
it devotes almost the entire non-Social Security surplus to tax cuts, leaving no room for
other legitimate uses such as reducing the $5.6 trillion national debt.
WASHINGTON — The Concord Coalition today urged the House of Representatives to
reject the The Financial Freedom Act of 1999 (H.R. 2488) because it relies too heavily on
projections of huge future budget surpluses that are unlikely to materialize, and because
it devotes almost the entire non-Social Security surplus to tax cuts, leaving no room for
other legitimate uses such as reducing the $5.6 trillion national debt.
“To their credit, both parties now generally agree that the Social Security
surplus should not be used to finance other operations of government. Now the question is how to best allocate the
non-Social Security surplus. Caution should
be the word of the day. We must be careful
not to squander this opportunity to build a better economy for future generations. The moral of the story is, don’t count your
chickens before they hatch, or don’t commit your surpluses before they
materialize,” said Policy Director Robert Bixby.
The Concord Coalition released a chart illustrating that baseline surplus
projections can vary widely depending on the policy assumptions regarding discretionary
and emergency spending. Entitled “The
On-Budget Surplus: CBO Baselines Under Alternative Policy Assumptions,” the chart
shows that the ten-year, non-Social Security surplus varies from $996 billion to $46
billion depending on the assumptions that are used.
“A baseline cannot be separated from its policy assumptions. It’s true that if all the policy assumptions
behind the projections turn out to be correct, we’ll hit baseline bingo.
But if some of the assumptions turn out to be even slightly optimistic, the surplus
projections drop considerably. This argues
for great caution in making permanent commitments based on projections. We shouldn’t base our long-term fiscal policy
on the chance that we’ll win baseline bingo,” Bixby said.
The existence of a ten-year $1 trillion surplus, over and above Social Security,
depends on a series of policy decisions that few in Washington believe will be made and
many are actively opposing. For example, the
baseline assumes that the discretionary spending caps will hold, and yet appropriators of
both parties insist that they won’t be able to pass their bills if the caps are not
raised. Moreover, the baseline assumes there
will be no emergency spending, yet according to CBO, emergency appropriations have
averaged $8.9 billion a year since 1991, excluding the Gulf War. This raises questions — if the policies on which
the surplus projections are based are unlikely to come to pass, how likely is it that the
surpluses will come about or that they will be as large as projected?
“The bottom line is that unrealistic policy assumptions lead to improbable
baselines that can be used to justify policies, whether they be tax cuts or permanent
spending increases, that are unaffordable over the long term,” Bixby said.
