Goodlatte Statement at Hearing on “The Federal Government on Autopilot: Mandatory Spending and the Entitlement Crisis”

Chairman Goodlatte: Thank you, Chairman King, for convening this sixth hearing of the Task Force on Executive Overreach, this one focusing on the mandatory federal spending that risks stripping current and future generations of so many of the opportunities previous generations enjoyed. Federal spending as a percent of gross domestic product, broken down by category, shows that entitlement spending has grown the fastest, and now consumes the largest percentage of our GDP. In the past, U.S. public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product generally rose as a result of having to conduct wars of a limited duration.  When those wars were over, the debt was gradually paid off.  More recently, however, public debt has risen as a result, not of wars, but of having to pay for entitlement programs that are of indefinite duration and difficult to reduce over time. Total discretionary spending as a percentage of our economy has gone down.  Defense spending as a percentage of our economy has gone down.  Other, non-defense discretionary spending has also gone down.  What is increasingly going up is total mandatory spending as a percentage of our economy, such that mandatory spending now dominates the federal budget.  Making matters even worse, the deficit spending it causes will lead to ballooning interest payments in the years to come as interest rates reach normal – that is, higher -- levels. By 2026, it’s predicted that so much of the federal budget will be devoted to mandatory entitlement spending that just a sliver of incoming annual revenue will be left to pay for everything the federal government does other than mandatory entitlement spending -- such as paying for national defense, our federal courts, federal policing, natural disasters, basic research, and everything else. Federal tax rates are already steeply progressive, and the pool of people in the labor market from whom taxes can be drawn is shrinking, as fewer and fewer people report even looking for work. At the same time, older generations receive more in public benefits than they pay in taxes, and so future generations will have to pay much more in taxes to cover both the public benefits costs to themselves and the costs incurred by all who came before them.  As fewer younger people must pay more to support the benefits for larger, older generations, younger people are less able to afford children of their own, and so are having fewer children, and the situation worsens going forward in a perverse ripple effect.  Indeed, a 2013 cross-national study looked at measures such as public debt per child, the ratio of childhood to elderly poverty, and the skew toward older generations in social spending.  The study found that the United States ranked worst – dead last -- among 29 advanced countries in the degree to which it imposes disproportionately large burdens on future generations. As University of Virginia philosophy professor Loren Lomasky has written, “Theorists have devoted considerable attention to injustices committed across lines of race [and] gender … Far less attended are concerns of intergenerational fairness.  That omission is serious.  Measures that have done very well by the Baby Boomers are much less generous to their children and worse still for their grandchildren … [T]he single greatest unsolved problem of justice in the developed world today is transgenerational plunder.”  That’s grossly unfair to our young Americans, and to the well-being of our pluralistic society as a whole. I believe the only way to ensure Congress acts with fiscal restraint over the long term is to pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.  Back in 1995, when a balanced budget amendment came within one vote of passing, the gross federal debt stood at $4.9 trillion.  Today it stands at over $19 trillion.  Experience has proven time and again that Congress can’t for any significant length of time rein in excessive spending. But two-thirds of each House of Congress has yet to come to really appreciate that history and this looming fiscal crisis.  I look forward to hearing from all our witnesses today and examining solutions for bringing our fiscal house in order. For more on today’s hearing, click here. Learn more about the Task Force here.