Imagine that you’re renting an apartment and the terms of the lease require paying your landlord $2,000 every month.
Now, imagine that the lease expires at the end of this month. Here you sit, on July 1, with no lease signed for the month of August. Congratulations, you’ve now got $2,000 extra dollars that you can spend on anything else. Take a vacation! Buy a fancy new computer! Eat 1,300 Costco hot dogs!
“Wait a minute,” you might be thinking, “where am I going to live in this hypothetical situation? Surely, I’ll have to sign a new lease that will cost somewhere around the same amount as the one I’ve been paying. I’ll need that $2,000 when I renew this lease or sign a different one.”
Ah, but that’s because you haven’t discovered the magic of “current policy” baseline budgeting, which is all the rage among Republicans who want to pass an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. Those tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year, but GOP lawmakers think they have found a way to avoid the budgetary cost of extending them. That cost is steep: about $4.6 trillion over the next 10 years, if the tax cuts are extended in full with no spending cuts to offset them. The “current policy” baseline, however, allows members of Congress to ignore that.
Using the “current policy” baseline, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Senate version of the tax bill—which could get a final vote as soon as today—will reduce the long-term deficit by about $521 billion. When evaluated in a more typical way, without that giant gimmick, the bill will add about $3.9 trillion to the deficit.
Comparing government budgets to a household is never a perfect apples-to-apples measurement. Still, that’s about the same as if you’d agreed to a new lease at the same $2,000 per month rate, but you were going to set your personal household budget on the assumption that the new lease costs nothing since you are merely extending the terms of the old lease. That’s ridiculous, of course, since you can’t spend the same dollars twice.
The result will be the same, too: a fiscal mess that will require higher borrowing to make ends meet. Hopefully, you haven’t maxed out your credit card already, the way Congress has.
Extending the tax cuts is a good idea—and making them permanent in the first place would have been even better. Unless Congress acts this year, nearly every single American will face an income tax hike next year. That’s an outcome that should be avoided.
But it does not justify the gimmicky process that Republicans have settled upon for passing the extension. It also should not justify opening the door to a future budgetary process where this “current policy” baseline is used to make every new government policy appear less costly than it really is.
Indeed, it’s not difficult to imagine how Democrats could happily use the same logic to pass, for example, a “Medicare for All” bill that effectively implements single-payer health care at the federal level.
Such a proposal would come with a price tag in the vicinity of $10 trillion over the usual, 10-year budget window. That’s an amount of spending that would be tough to swallow even by Congress’ standards for fiscal screwiness.
Ah, but what if it could cost just $1 trillion instead? Here’s how: Pass a “Medicare for All” bill that expires after just a single year. Then, pass a permanent extension of that same program and evaluate the budget impact on a “current policy” baseline. Magically, the extension now costs nothing.
Sahil Kapur, a reporter for NBC News, says he’s run that exact scenario past Republican congressional aids, and they admit it would be a plausible outcome—depending, of course, on the future makeup of Congress.
Maybe it won’t be Medicare for All. Maybe it will be the so-called Green New Deal. Maybe it will be some other huge spending package. The specifics don’t matter, but the process does. Deploying the “current policy” baseline for the tax bill isn’t just a gimmick to help smooth the passage of this one piece of legislation—it is a new loophole that can (and will) be used by future lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to hide the cost of major initiatives.
As several senators and political reporters have noted, this maneuver effectively kills the filibuster in a backhanded way, since it would allow future Congresses to pass huge spending bills via the reconciliation process instead of requiring 60 votes.
“Their plan to blow up the Senate rulebook and sidestep nonpartisan scorekeepers is unprecedented and further demonstrates their complete hypocrisy when it comes to the filibuster,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D–Calif.) in a statement this week. “And we will not forget.”
A more deliberately opaque budget process that opens the door to more spending and kills the filibuster is a path to even less fiscal responsibility and a recipe for more borrowing. This is a mistake on its own, but it looks even more foolish because that “current policy” baseline puts the federal government on course to borrow about $30 trillion more by the end of this decade.
You can’t ignore your rent payment, spend the money on other things, and assume it will all work out, but that’s exactly what Congress is poised to do—and the cost will be added to an already towering pile of debt.
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