Last Wednesday, President Obama requested approximately $6.2 billion to combat the Ebola epidemic. As Congress examines and debates this proposal, it is an important opportunity to reexamine our government’s budgetary policies.
Last Wednesday, President Obama requested approximately $6.2 billion to combat the Ebola epidemic. As Congress examines and debates this proposal, it is an important opportunity to reexamine our government’s budgetary policies.
Whether it’s Ebola, ISIS, or the child migrant crisis, our nation faced a number of unforeseen challenges this year that required action (and emergency spending) by the federal government. These challenges serve as reminders of a key underlying purpose of fiscal responsibility: To enable the country to deal with the unexpected.
We can’t predict the future. But having lower debt and deficits can give us the fiscal flexibility to act quickly when crises arise. Alternatively, irresponsible budget policies leave the government with higher borrowing costs and fewer resources to deal with changing circumstances.
Furthermore, responsible budgeting isn’t just about keeping spending in line with revenue. It’s about making sure our tax and spending policies reflect our priorities as a nation.
If federal investment in hospital and emergency preparedness is important to us, for example, we must be willing to carve space for it when budgeting. In the current budgetary environment, this type of spending is subject to tight caps and sequester cuts. Spending on Centers for Disease Control (CDC) emergency preparedness accounted for less than 0.05 percent of the federal budget in 2013, or $1.8 billion — its lowest level in over a decade. If we want to spend more, we need to be willing to pay for it through higher taxes or cuts in other spending.
Furthermore, experts agree that keeping Ebola out of the United States will require treating it at the source, and that requires spending abroad — as some of the money in the President’s request would. Yet foreign aid is frequently the target of attacks on wasteful spending despite the fact that it comprises only about one percent of the federal budget. Global health programs account for an even smaller proportion: just 0.22 percent of federal spending, or about $7.7 billion in 2013.
All this should serve as a reminder to policymakers that they must confront the real drivers of our debt (changing demographics and rising health care costs) rather than continue to cut smaller programs where investing a little today can save us further fiscal pain down the road. We can’t always prevent unforeseen disasters, but we can make sure we have the fiscal flexibility to address them when they arise.
