The big budget line that Very Serious People refuse to cut

Annie Lowrey laments that the budget lines that are big are the ones people want to spare from cuts, and the ones they want to cut don’t make up much of the budget. But the big counterexample-from her own chart-goes unmentioned.

A feature by budget reporter Annie Lowrey in today’s New York Times (you have to scroll down a bit; it’s the post labeled “When Reality and Perception Part Ways” and seems to lack its own anchor) laments the fact that

“the biggest, fastest-growing expenses tend to be the ones Americans object most to cutting.”

“Fastest-growing” I’ll grant, in the sense that those items all have to do with health care programs—and not Social Security, which Lowrey lumps in with them. But restraining long-term growth in those will require not some sort of Nietzschean will to cruelty, as Very Serious People believe, but conceptually difficult policy changes, carefully crafted and iteratively tested. Moreover we should, frankly, get used to the inevitable growth of health care as a proportion of private and public budgets, given that health care is labor intensive; and journalists ought to help with our getting used to it.

In the meantime, since all that growth won’t happen right away, there’s an item that represents a huge part of the federal budget and that a very comfortable majority is happy to cut (.pdf)—according to Lowrey’s own chart. But she doesn’t mention cutting it as a proper goal of budget negotiations. In this she perfectly reflects the VSP consensus that allowing spending on it to decline substantially would be, you know, Inappropriate. Any guesses what it is? (Answer after the jump.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No prize for guessing: Defense.

 

Author: Andrew Sabl

Andrew Sabl, a political theorist, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics and Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England, both from Princeton University Press. His research interests include political ethics, liberal and democratic theory, toleration, the work of David Hume, and the realist school of contemporary political thought. He is currently finishing a book for Harvard University Press titled The Uses of Hypocrisy: An Essay on Toleration. He divides his time between Toronto and Brooklyn.