U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, according to the Magnolia Tribune website, is not happy about the Department of Defense’s proposed budget for the coming year.
Wicker said President Trump “deserves a military capable of maintaining deterrence and applying force when necessary.” But the proposed budget, he added, will not deliver it.
The influential Mississippi senator, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee, said he believes the administration plans to keep defense spending at $893 billion per year for each of the next four years. However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the administration is asking for a $961 billion budget next year.
Whatever amount defense gets next year, it doesn’t matter as much as the bigger picture. Wicker said the United States needs to commit more money to defense to keep up with China. That’s a reasonable opinion, but the honest truth is the government can’t afford it.
Maybe it’s better to say the government shouldn’t budget it, because its current revenue and spending trends are badly out of whack.
The government’s willingness to spend far more money that it brings in each year has made it obvious that almost nobody in Washington believes the government should even bother trying to create a balanced budget.
The extra money that Wicker wants for defense is easy to find. It’s in the $949 billion of interest payments that the government made last year on its $36 trillion debt. Those loan repayments were $123 billion more than the entire defense budget, according to a detailed story on The Washington Post website about the debt. Cut those payments in half and it gives you $474 billion to spend on more important things.
Unfortunately, to reduce the amount of interest the government pays on its borrowings, it has to borrow less. And that ain’t happening.
In the last eight fiscal years, four from President Trump’s first term and four under President Biden, spending outpaced revenue by a total of more than $13 trillion. During President Obama’s eight years, annual deficits added another $7 trillion to the debt.
There were legitimate reasons for some of the deficits: the Great Recession in 2009 and the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. But no emergency lasted the entire 16 years. It’s just that presidents and congresses realized they could get away with borrowing a lot of money for other people to repay later.
Looking at the revenue side, tax receipts have risen from $2.11 trillion in 2009 to an estimated $4.92 trillion in 2024, according to TheBalanceMoney website. But each year spending outpaced revenue by a wide margin.
The battle for fiscal common sense may be lost. There does not appear to be any willingness for revenue increases, whether Social Security, Medicare or income taxes, that would start chipping away at the debt. And there clearly is no willingness to live within our means. Every few years, there’s a calamity that propels spending.
Elon Musk and his DOGE team made big headlines, but instead of asking experienced government workers for ideas on how to save money, they just got rid of a bunch of them. The public is better served by a detailed, orderly review of spending that identifies solutions.
At some point, those massive interest payments will really sting. The amount owed each year will keep rising, and more government needs will not be met. It may even prompt a debate on whether to stop repaying those who bought government bonds. That is not the image that the nation providing the world’s safest currency wants to project.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
