Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.
Almost 10 years ago, I testified before the Senate Finance Committee that the debt limit should be abolished. Among the others who testified that day, including Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, no one supported my position.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
The negotiations leading up to Sunday night’s announcement that President Obama and Congressional leaders of both parties had reached a deal to cut trillions of dollars in federal spending over the next decade makes the case against the debt limit that much stronger. We now know that it is a powerful mechanism for political extortion.
Unless the party holding the White House has a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives and at least 60 seats in the Senate, raising the debt limit is going to remain a means by which the minority party can impose its demands on the majority.
Even if the Treasury avoids default on government debt this week, we will inevitably have to go through the same political drama the next time the debt limit runs out and every time thereafter. And sooner or later the shoe will be on the other foot, as Democrats hold the debt limit hostage against a Republican president.
Unfortunately, the option of just letting the debt limit expire is not available. It is permanent law and can be abolished only by repeal or by a ruling by the Supreme Court that it is unconstitutional. Note that the law does not impose a deadline at which the debt limit runs out; rather, the limit is a dollar figure that must be amended when the gross federal debt reaches it. The date when the limit is breached is a function of Treasury’s cash flow and expenses.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to “borrow money on the credit of the United States.” Before World War I, it had to authorize each and every Treasury bond issue and its precise terms. During an era when the federal budget was usually balanced, this was not a huge problem.
But with the unprecedented borrowing needs of the First World War, Congress ceded to Treasury the power to decide when and under what terms it would borrow, subject only to an overall dollar limitation.
While politicians and the general public believe that the debt limit is an important constraint on national indebtedness, not one iota of evidence supports this belief. Economists have been making this point repeatedly for more than 50 years. In 1959, Marshall Robinson of the Brookings Institution came to this conclusion in a book-length study of the debt limit:
On the record, the debt ceiling experiment has failed. Although at times the ceiling has clamped down on government spending, it has not prevented the long-term growth of debt. Indeed, there is some evidence that reactions to its short-run pressure may ultimately contribute to the growth of debt.
Before 1974, it was plausible to argue that there was some virtue in having a debt limit because it forced Congress to acknowledge the consequences of deficit spending from time to time. But that year, it enacted the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, which requires Congress to enact a budget resolution annually that specifies an appropriate level for the deficit and the debt.
Consequently, a separate vote on the debt limit is at best superfluous. As the General Accounting Office put it in a 1979 report:
The implementation of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 has brought into question the need for the Congress to consider the debt ceiling separately from the budget process.
This fact led Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, to recommend abolition of the debt limit in 2003 testimony:
In the Congress’s review of the mechanisms governing the budget process, you may want to reconsider whether the statutory limit on the public debt is a useful device. As a matter of arithmetic, the debt ceiling is either redundant or inconsistent with the paths of revenues and outlays you specify when you legislate a budget.
Mr. Greenspan’s point is crucial: the decision to run a deficit and increase national indebtedness is made by Congress when it votes to cut taxes, create entitlement programs and enact appropriations that will necessarily cause spending to be higher than revenues – not when it raises the debt limit.
As the Congressional Budget Office put it in a 2010 report:
By itself, setting a limit on the debt is an ineffective means of controlling deficits because the decisions that necessitate borrowing are made through other legislative actions. By the time an increase in the debt ceiling comes up for approval, it is too late to avoid paying the government’s pending bills without incurring serious negative consequences.
It is nothing but grandstanding for members of both parties to vote routinely for legislation that they know will create deficits and then profess shock and horror that the debt limit must be increased as a consequence. Even Captain Renault in “Casablanca” would be offended by such hypocrisy.
Historically, raising the debt limit was mere political theater giving cover to Congressional double-talkers because everyone knew that it would be increased. But that is no longer a foregone conclusion now that a significant number of Republicans in both the House and Senate believe that default on the debt is preferable to deficit spending.
Indeed, many say publicly that they will never support a debt limit increase under any circumstances and will even filibuster one, asserting that default would actually be a good thing because the budget would be balanced overnight.
For these reasons, the debt limit must be abolished. While that is extremely unlikely at this time, it is nevertheless necessary. As the computer eventually learned in the movie “War Games,” the only way to avoid disaster in this sort of game is not to play.
