Pay As You Go

NDOL recommends bringing back PAYGO. Some Republicans in Congress are starting to support it. It sounds like a very good idea (it must be, since Bush is dead set against it).

There were a variety of factors that made the elimination of federal budget deficits -- and the creation of budget surpluses -- during the Clinton administration. Chief among them was a brilliantly successful administration economic strategy that produced the longest period of low-inflation, high-employment, broad-based economic growth since the 1960s. But it didn't hurt that Congress was operating under strict budget rules enacted in 1990. These included "caps" on Congressional appropriations, and a rule called PAYGO (for "pay as you go") that created a point of order on the House and Senate floors against any proposal for new entitlement spending or new tax cuts that wasn't offset by spending cuts or revenue increases. (The point of order could be waived by a super-majority vote, but that rarely happened.) These rules were abandoned by Congress in 2002 at the request of the Bush administration, which was busily doing everything possible to eliminate budget surpluses and return the federal government to an era of big deficits, mainly through its monomaniacal insistence on tax cuts targeted to the wealthiest Americans. With virtually all Congressional Democrats and a growing number of Congressional Republicans becoming alarmed at the torrent of red ink engulfing the federal government, there's a new impetus to bring back tough budget rules, especially PAYGO. The administration, alternating almost daily between denying that deficits matter, pretending it intends to do something about them, or blaming them on somebody else -- anybody -- opposes a return to PAYGO if tax cuts are included. Late last week, however, the Senate, with four Republicans joining all but one Democrat, included PAYGO in its version of the federal budget resolution for the next fiscal year....