Brian Riedl of Heritage on Averting National Bankruptcy.wmv

This whole series shows that rising entitlement spending will bankrupt us and the Bush Tax Cuts are not to blame.

Ernest Dumas in his article “What accounts for the revolutionary spending binge in Washington and state capitals?,” (Arkansas Times, Feb 16, 2011) asserted:

Runaway government spending on social programs or even on banks and General Motors is not the cause of the federal or state deficits. Mainly, it is a dramatic decline in government revenues, owing to tax cuts and the deepest, longest recession in 70 years engendered by these conservatives.

We have heard the liberals say for years that Bush put us into this horrible position of deficits because of his tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. However, if Bush was responsible for taking the 236 billion surplus he inherited in 2000 and turning everything downward because of the tax cuts, then why did we only have a budget deficit of 161 billion in 2007?

Brian Riedl is the author of the article “The Three Biggest Myths About Tax Cuts and the Budget Deficit,” (Heritage Foundation, June 21, 2010), and the next few days I will be sharing portions of his article

Brian Riedl is The Heritage Foundation’s lead budget analyst and has built a solid reputation for interpreting, explaining and reforming the often arcane realm of federal budget policy.

Indeed, much of the current backlash against runaway federal spending can be attributed to Riedl’s work. As far back as 2002 and 2003, his writings exposed the beginnings of a federal spending spree that was pushing real federal spending to more than $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II.

Abstract: The annual federal budget deficit is projected to reach 8.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020—more than three times the historical average of 2.3 percent. This dramatic increase in the federal deficit will be exclusively the result of increasing spending, not declining revenues (or the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts). Rapid growth in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid costs and interest payments on the national debt will cause virtually all of this new spending. Any sustainable fix must therefore address the source of the problem—rapidly rising entitlement spending.