The Hill News

It's a sign of the magnitude of our fiscal challenges that even the good news is bad news in the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report.  The only glimmer of progress in CBO's 2012 Budget and Outlook is that  discretionary spending is finally on the decline.  Thanks to the perseverance of Republicans, backed by an American public thoroughly fed up with wasteful Washington spending, projected discretionary spending will drop to just 5.6 percent of GDP by 2022.  Our efforts to secure significant spending cuts in both the FY2011 and FY2012 budgets, as well as the Budget Control Act, will result in the lowest level of discretionary spending in 50 years.

Although this is a substantial achievement, it also serves to highlight the enormity of the debt -- and how little of it can be addressed through discretionary spending cuts alone.  In testimony before the House Budget Committee last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke stated succinctly that ! Congress "could cut discretionary spending pretty close to zero and not solve the problem in the long term."  Bernanke admitted that tax increases advocated by President Obama will not do the job either -- even if combined with major spending reductions.

Read more...