EDITORIAL: Group shines a light on Washington’s spending problem

It’s an article of faith on the left that budget deficits reflect a lack of tax revenue rather than overspending. If the government could just raise another $33 trillion by making the “rich” pay their “fair share,” this line of thought goes, Beltway politicians could erase the federal debt.

Yet this theory has it precisely backward. Washington and the states have a spending problem. And tax guru Grover Norquist has set out to prove it.

Mr. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, has helped launch the Sustainable Budget Project “to document the rise in government spending over the past decade,” he wrote this week in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Norquist is not against increases in public outlays. He just believes they shouldn’t be unlimited and are now on a trajectory that will be impossible to maintain.

“With more modest growth in state government spending,” Mr. Norquist notes, “lawmakers can lower taxes and Americans can keep more of what they earn.”

Over the past decade — from 2013-2022 — federal spending increased 70 percent, more than three times the rate of population growth and inflation combined. At the state level, spending among the 50 states rose 52 percent, more than twice population and inflation.

“If government grows faster than” population growth combined with inflation, Mr. Norquist points out, “then it is growing faster than the average taxpayer can afford.”

Of equal importance are the ramifications for red ink. Like compound interest, the value of spending caps are enormous. Had Washington limited spending hikes over the past two decades to the rate of population growth and inflation combined, “the national debt would have increased by less than $500 billion instead of $19 trillion.”

Like most states, Nevada spending has long exceeded this benchmark. According to Americans for Tax Reform, Silver State outlays over the past decade increased by around 10 percent, three times the rate of population and inflation together. There’s work to be done in Carson City, but it’s a step forward that most states, including Nevada, have constitutional provisions mandating balanced budgets, unlike the federal government.

Nevertheless, “American taxpayers could have been spared more than $2 trillion in taxes and debt if federal and state governments,” the group notes, “had simply grown no faster than the rate of population growth plus inflation during the previous decade.”

Certainly, taxes are a vital part of civilized society. Yet according to the Tax Foundation, the average American already must devote one-third of his or her earnings toward paying taxes at the federal, state and local levels. How much is enough? To ignore the spending side of the equation will get you to $33 trillion in debt … and counting.