There's been some surprise over Barack Obama's ambitious promise to cut the deficit in half by 2012. There are times, of course, when you need to cut the deficit. But it seems a strange point of focus amidst a stimulus package and a bank recapitalization and a health care reform bill and an energy bill and a homeowners bailout. But as The Washington Post explains, there's rather less to Obama's deficit promise than meets they eye:
The deficit is perhaps the trickiest issue in Obama's spending plan. He has pledged to cut it in half by the end of his first term. Specifically, administration officials say the annual gap between federal spending and tax collections will fall from something north of $1.4 trillion this year -- the highest since World War II -- to $533 billion in 2013.But Republicans and some budget analysts noted that this highly touted goal is not particularly ambitious: This year's budget deficit is bloated by spending on the stimulus package and various financial-sector bailouts, expenses unlikely to be repeated in future years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently predicted that the deficit could be halved by 2013 merely by winding down the war in Iraq and allowing some of the tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration to expire in 2011, as Obama has proposed. That alone would cut the deficit to $715 billion, according to the CBO."It's easy to cut the deficit in half after you've quadrupled it," said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "The end of the recession, the drawdown of Iraq spending and the end of temporary stimulus spending will by itself cut the deficit in half."
In this telling, deficit reduction is less a policy than an absence of other policies. It assumes the stimulus will not be repeated, and that the tax cuts will expire. In this, it's a promise of obvious choices rather than hard ones. But that's only true if everything goes according to plan. If the recession proves lengthy and further stimulus is needed, or cap-and-trade doesn't pass and the carbon revenues do not manifest themselves, then the promise to cut the deficit in half remains but the easy road to the savings closes.
