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Heritage
Network
The
More You Buy, the More You Save
by
Amy Payne
December
12, 2013
‘Tis
the season for sales. But beware of this enticing line: “The more
you buy, the more you save!”
Because,
when the bill comes, the truth is: The more you buy, the more you
spend.
Some
Members of Congress are using this logic in their latest budget
proposal. They’re promising savings—but they’re actually just
spending more (of your money).
Yesterday,
Representative Raśl Labrador (R-ID) expressed strong opposition to
the budget plan, explaining, “We are making promises of future
spending decreases again, for actual spending increases today.”
Promises
of future spending cuts. That should sound familiar. As Heritage
visiting fellow Patrick Louis Knudsen has explained, this is one of
several tricks Congress uses to make its proposals sound appealing in
the short term. He calls it “Spend Now, Save Later.”
“This
time-honored practice does just what the name implies: It spends
money up front with the promise of cutting spending and reducing
deficits later.”
Sure
enough, the latest budget plan promises it will reduce the
deficit—later. But not without raising the deficit first!
The
Ryan-Murray budget plan would increase the deficit by $45 billion
over the next three years. But later on—maybe in about nine
years?—it will start reducing…the deficit it just increased.
It
spends long before it saves. The more you buy, the more you spend.
Spending is the now—and the later may never come.
Speaking
of faulty promises, you may have heard that the proposal includes
increasing TSA “user fees” for travelers. Even this
characterization is a bait-and-switch: The fee increase would not
have anything to do with making your air travel safer or smoother.
Instead, it would pump new money into the Treasury’s general fund
for more government spending.
Congress
will not make any progress toward balancing the budget—and avoiding
future debt ceiling and government shutdown fights—until it gets
serious about hitting the brakes on spending your hard-earned money.
The more they spend, the more we pay.
Read
this article with links, plus more at Heritage
Network
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