Lee Hamilton

Columnist

As the people in charge of Congress scramble to meet a self-imposed July 4 deadline for passing their version of President Trump’s huge tax and budget bill, they’ve had to contend with an inconvenient fact: The Congressional Budget Office — their own in-house group of nonpartisan analysts — says the bill will add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years. This is in addition to an existing debt that many of them have said for years is out of control.

This set me thinking. Republicans and some Democrats argue that our national debt — which at the moment stands at more than $36 trillion — needs to be addressed. And ordinary Americans grasp intuitively that this is the case. Yet year after year (with one notable exception, which I’ll get to below), we keep adding to it. Why is that?

The short answer is simple: Politics. Or, to add a few words: Neither elected officials nor the voting public really want to do what it takes.

That’s because the only sustainable way to control deficits, and hence cut into the national debt, is to raise taxes and lower spending. There’s no other choice: the argument that tax cuts will produce enough growth to help erase the debt has so far been an illusion. That’s why a sustainable effort to tackle the debt has to be bipartisan: Democrats tend to see the solution as reversing out-of-control tax cuts; Republicans see it as reining in out-of-control spending; both need to happen. It’ll take legislators of both parties rolling up their sleeves and getting to work.

The challenge is that a lot of our spending goes to the military, health care, and Social Security (and, increasingly, servicing the debt itself). And as the current national debate about Medicaid cuts and threats to Social Security makes clear, Americans really don’t like cuts to those programs. Same with the other side of the ledger: If the federal government is to boost its revenues, it’s going to have to raise taxes or, at least, reverse past tax cuts. But Americans don’t like that approach, either. No wonder members of Congress would rather just hope they can make it to retirement before the country comes to a reckoning.

What you need to know, however, is that we’ve actually made this work. Within living memory, in fact.

Under President George H.W. Bush, Congress passed a law that placed a limit on annual appropriations and required any revenue or spending legislation that would increase the budgetary deficit to be offset. After Bill Clinton became president, he and Congress agreed to an approach using those constraints to impose new taxes that fell almost entirely on upper-income taxpayers; craft a budget that restrained some spending, especially on defense; and allow the federal government to benefit from a healthy economy and stock market that produced unexpected revenues from taxes. The result was to put the federal government on a trajectory that not only cut sharply into annual deficits, but for a few years at the end of the 1990s actually produced a surplus and put the country on a course to eliminate the debt. When George W. Bush took over as President, he argued that the surplus belonged to taxpayers, and enacted tax cuts that sent us back into deficits, which have grown ever since under presidents of both parties.

The 1990s were a different era from today, and the pain that tackling the national debt would impose is greater now. Which is why, if we’re truly going to do it, Republicans, Democrats, and ordinary voters will all have to grit their teeth and agree to policies that they don’t like. Can we do this? I’m dubious. I don’t think it speaks well of us that it’s likely it won’t happen until we face a true fiscal crisis that creates the political will to raise taxes and tackle entitlements and defense budgets.

But this is where it comes back to voters. If you’re concerned about the debt, then the people you elect to Congress need to hear it — and lose your vote if they don’t pay attention. If enough legislators get the message, we can do this.

Lee Hamilton is a Senior Advisor for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government; a Distinguished Scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies; and a Professor of Practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.