Why Don't We Talk About Spending?

Remember when nearly all political debate centered around government spending? Everyone was talking about the national debt hitting $17 trillion. Thousands of people were in the street, and thousands more online, demanding an end to the stimulus and fundamental reforms to Medicare and Social Security before they went bankrupt. Fiscal cliffs and balanced budgets and sequestration were the talk of Washington.

And now? Any talk of reforming entitlements, apart from expanding them, is verboten. The GOP, supposedly the party of fiscal sanity and restraint, has nominated for president a man who considers Medicare and Social Security off limits entirely, and even Paul Ryan has seemingly given up his quest for meaningful entitlement reform for the time being. Proposals for a Balanced Budget Amendment, the center of debate just four years ago, suddenly seem antiquated and out of step with the times.

Meanwhile, the national debt has surpassed $19.5 trillion, the budget deficit is nearly $600 billion, and Social Security and Medicare are both expected to cease being able to fully pay for benefits within the next two decades—Medicare by 2028 and Social Security by 2034.

So why are so few people talking about the issue now, when the situation is if anything even more serious than it was four years ago?

Part of the reason is that so much has happened over those four years to shift the political conversation. Illegal immigration has surged, and President Obama in turn has introduced far-reaching and unconstitutional executive orders to legalize many of those immigrants. Gun control, too, has become a much greater issue, as has race relations and accountability in the law enforcement community. On the international stage, terrorist attacks around the world, coupled with the rise of ISIS, the continuing civil war in Syria, and the greater assertiveness of Putin’s Russia have all served to shift attention elsewhere.

But another important factor is that many Republican voters and Tea Party members—especially older voters, who have been the grassroots force behind many fiscally conservative proposals—have proven themselves to not, in fact, be especially conservative on such issues. This was proven most vividly during the primaries, when many such voters abandoned conservatives champions like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio in favor of Trump, who didn’t even bother to pretend to be a fiscal conservative. Instead, he loudly promised to protect entitlements, Social Security, and Medicare for everyone, and condemned anyone who sought entitlement reform as hating the poor and elderly. A classic liberal argument—and many voters bought it.

Many of those same older voters never cared much for entitlement reform—at least not their entitlements. It was always easier to fight against the stimulus, against wasteful government programs that never directly affected them. But when it came time to discuss Social Security and Medicare, those topics were largely off the table for those voters, even when conservatives made clear that any restructurings would only affect future retirees, and were necessary for the programs to stay solvent.

Absent an energetic voting bloc that consistently pushed for broad-based entitlement reform, the novelty of cutting spending in Washington quickly wore off. There will always be support for eliminating waste and pork-barrel spending. But much of the national spending problem is driven by current and proposed entitlements—and despite any protests they might make to the contrary, many older Republican voters are just as opposed to reform as Democrats.