Redefining 'Fiscal Responsibility' - At high cost

Congressional "Pay-As-You-Go" budgeting translates to perpetually bigger government

Want to ensure the growth of government? Forever?
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Pay-Go became law as a part of the 1990 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. (It went away in 2002, only to be reinstated in January of this year.) The problems with Pay-Go, however, became apparent immediately. It did nothing to reduce spending, and everything to prevent tax cuts.
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Before Pay-Go, "fiscal responsibility" meant limiting federal expenditure to what the government could reasonably afford. Under Pay-Go, spending hawks slowly went the way of the dodo, to be replaced by "deficit hawks". These creatures are first and foremost concerned with the Congressional bottom line, and are far more willing to raise taxes than reduce spending to maintain it.

Responsibility used to mean frugality; it now means tax hikes to pay for as much government as possible. Accordingly, you can be an Ear-Marxist and still be a "deficit hawk", so long as you raise taxes enough to foot the bills.

And despite replete examples throughout our history that reducing taxes actually increases the revenue Washington collects, under Pay-Go Congress can not decrease taxes a dollar here without raising taxes a dollar there or cutting spending a dollar somewhere.

And this is merely the tip of the Washington ice berg the media wishes to see.

Only in this press-induced haze can the federal government spend 1/5th of everything the nation creates and there be anyone calling it miserly.

Yet the media are doing exactly that. They are never ones to see any government program go without ever more, each and every year. Only they can call a program's increase of a lesser percentage than that it had grown the previous year a "cut."

And so Pay-Go goes. Were it rightly defined by the press, the mess in Washington would by now be a great deal less.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=24059