Knowingly Flunking Budget Math

Dan Mitchell

Dec 5

The United States is in fiscal trouble because of over-spending by Washington. And the problem will get worse in the future because of poorly designed entitlement programs.

But it also will get worse because Washington is filled with politicians who knowingly lie and simply don't care.

To illustrate, here's a viral tweet from Congressman Ro Khanna of California, which received 4.5 million views, followed by two correcting tweets (here and here) from Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute.

Sadly, neither of Brian's tweets received much attention (less than 10,000 views compared to 4,500,000 views for Khanna's nonsense).

Yet every honest person (including some honest leftists) knows Brian's analysis is correct and Congressman Khanna is doing nothing but providing vapid and fraudulent clickbait.

Megan McArdle wrote about this for the Washington Post. Here are some excerpts.

Khanna's assertions about the debt are simply not true, not even in the low, Washington sense of facially correct, yet wildly misleading. And I assume Khanna knows better. ...everyone in Washington is playing the same damned game, a noxious hybrid of "let's pretend" and "not it." The budget hawks in the GOP have been effectively vanquished by the Trump faction, and the days when Democrats strove to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility are long gone. ...there is no excuse for failing to balance the books, except that the political trade-offs are hard, and — contra Khanna — almost certainly involve making changes to Social Security and Medicare. Together, these programs account for about one-third of spending, and that share is growing.This is America's real budget crisis. And yet it pales in comparison with the biggest problem of all: politicians who keep trying to pretend our troubles away, rather than face up to what needs to be done.

Megan is right about Khanna, and she's also right about Trump pushing aside fiscally rational Republicans.

So we have two parties in Washington controlled and led by people who are doing bad things, probably know they are doing bad things, but they simply don't care (just in case anyone wonders why I think politicians are disgusting and reprehensible).

P.S. Megan's column is wrong in that she also wrote that Ronald Reagan was "the most profligate of the bunch" in part because of his "failure to restrain spending." That's wildly wrong. A comprehensive study on fiscal history from the Mercatus Center showed LBJ and Nixon were the worst of the worst, while Reagan got the best marks. If you want to understand Reagan's track record on spending, click here, here, here, and here.