Government shutdown bad for Congress, worse for America

The looming threat of a U.S. government shutdown and temporary layoffs starting on Saturday has lessened with the Trump White House no longer insisting that border wall funding be part of legislation Congress must pass to extend authority for federal spending beyond Friday. Passage of a short-term budget resolution funding the government through Sept. 30 seems likely before the weekend.

Good. For months, President Trump and some of his top aides inexplicably believed that Republicans who control Washington could use fear of a government shutdown to leverage concessions from Democrats instead of grasping that such a shutdown would be blamed on the party in power.

But the reality is this: Lawmakers in any party who try to engineer shutdowns are behaving like juveniles, not demonstrating fiscal prudence or responsibility. Past shutdowns have accomplished nothing beyond inconveniencing millions of Americans who rely on federal services.

Yes, the federal government faces an immense long-term fiscal nightmare unless it controls spending. But while Republicans have long depicted themselves as worried about all this red ink, the fact is both parties have supported vast new spending — on wars, additional entitlements and more — and both bear vast responsibility for this history of profligacy.

Whether Republicans or Democrats split power or had unified control of Washington, the nation has run budget deficits for all but a handful of years since 1975. What’s needed is bipartisan resolve to stop passing kick-the-bucket-down-the-road budgets — not empty stunts like shutting down the government. Such resolve is hard to find.

Yet the aging of the population is going to balloon the costs of Social Security and Medicare as the United States enters an era in which there is a 2 to 1 ratio between taxpayers and recipients of those retirement benefits. Based on America’s present spending and revenue practices, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that interest on the national debt will go from the present $270 billion a year (about 7 percent of the total federal budget) to $712 billion in 2026 and, moreover, will be the third largest category of spending by 2028, after Social Security and Medicare, and the largest by 2050.

While the Trump administration’s proposed budget includes some domestic spending cuts, it also calls for substantially more military spending and would add nearly a half-trillion dollars to the U.S. national debt of $19.8 trillion.

It is not remotely the debt-slashing budget Trump promised as a candidate. Instead, it is just the latest example of Uncle Sam getting out the credit card rather than making tough decisions — and thus making a huge problem even worse.

Endlessly relying on debt is no way to run a household or a business. It’s also no way to run a country.

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