With soaring spending and exploding federal debt, the latest partisan dispute was inevitable.
Americans have a clear retort, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll: Regardless of party, they want cuts in federal spending and blame our dangerously soaring debt on Congress's failure to do so.
As usual, independents, many of whom are political refugees from the two parties, split the difference: 66% blamed too much spending for our debt woes, while only 12% faulted not enough taxes and 10% pointed to insufficient economic growth.
So it's logical to ask: Will spending ever be cut? And when will the debt stop growing so fast? The just concluded budget negotiations, which narrowly avoided a shutdown, show why the gloomy answer to those questions likely is "No" and "Never." Saturday's last-minute agreement to keep the government open for another 45 days largely hinged on debates over funding for Ukraine's war with Russia, border security, and disaster aid.
The new debt issued to cover the federal government's incessant spending growth will push up net federal interest payments to nearly $1 trillion a year by 2026, more than we will spend on either entitlements or defense and up from around $350 billion in 2021, as Issues & Insights showed recently.
Didn't we need all that spending to save the economy? Hardly, as the Center for Budget Priorities points out, only 12% of spending today is "Discretionary." Everything else, all 88% of it, is spending that is almost impossible to cut without broad agreement in Congress.
Voters desperately want spending cut and less debt at the federal level, as the I&I/TIPP Poll clearly indicates.
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