Hamill: Why fix deficits when you can just ignore the math?

I should be dead. For a man born in the United States in the year I was born, I just hit the average life expectancy.

OK, so probabilistically, it is not bizarre that I am still alive. But for a man born when my oldest child was born, his life expectancy at birth was 10% higher than mine.

In one generation, life expectancy went up by 10%. That is not unusual. When Social Security was enacted, the average American would not live to collect benefits.

Put a pin in that. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, is projected to add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years.

This is the Congressional Budget Office estimate. CBO forecasts deficits beyond the 10 years that are even larger.

We are well on track for the largest deficits as a percentage of gross domestic product in the history of the country. And we’re not at war. The bond market is not happy.

Our treasury secretary dismisses these projections as “D.C.-style scoring.” That is because he says CBO is for some reason fudging the numbers.

Politicians going back to the 1981 tax cuts have told us that we will grow our way out of the deficit. They again are saying this.

So, to reframe the politicians’ assessment of CBO’s numbers, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

“Whoa there, Hamill,” you say! Who says CBO is the truth-teller? Well, both the politicians and the CBO have a history to evaluate.

CBO has, in most years, been quite accurate in its assessments of projected budget deficits and surpluses. There is data to prove that.

CBO’s projections tended to overestimate the deficit in the early 2000s when we actually ran budget surpluses (really, we did).

CBO projected the 2017 tax cuts would add $1.9 trillion to the deficit through 2028. This underestimated the deficit by half.

So recently, CBO’s estimates have been off. But they have underestimated the deficit’s effects since 2017. This is not just a COVID shock thing.

The current deficit is about 100% of GDP. It is projected to grow to 156% of GDP by 2055.

CBO estimates are less reliable, as one would expect, over longer periods. But, again, CBO has tended to underestimate the deficit.

Some of this is the way that politicians operate. They put in tax cuts that are scheduled to expire in a certain number of years.

When the tax cuts reach expiry, the politicians howl that failure to extend them will be a big tax increase.

So, the cuts continue. CBO’s longer-term deficit estimates are then wrong, in part, because Congress changed the parameters.

To reduce deficits, we could raise taxes and also control spending like we did in 1997, which led to budget surpluses.

Some have argued that deficits are not bad if our spending is an investment. That’s a fair argument.

The government has invested with its spending. Former President Dwight Eisenhower built the interstate highway system after seeing the German Autobahn in World War II.

That highway system led to economic expansion. The spending led to growth, so that the deficit could be controlled.

The government has funded research at universities in a partnership that has changed the country and the world.

Biomedical research has improved human health and well-being in dramatic ways. This investment comes from funding scientific research at universities.

So back to me, the real focus of this column. I am alive, in large part, because of the medical advances made by research funded by the government.

And how did I find the life expectancies? By an internet search. How did we get the internet? By a multi-university research project funded by the Defense Department.

Some of our deficit may be acceptable if it invests in making our lives better. And, like me, makes our lives longer.

But the OBBBA is accompanied by cuts to sponsored research. This is odd for several reasons.

First, politicians criticize liberal arts degrees that do not actually exist. They applaud STEM programs at universities.

But the science, technology, engineering and math programs are under attack in the government’s budget. So, what we get is less revenue, more total spending, but less investment in that spending.

Maybe we can hope that Winston Churchill was right: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they have tried everything else.”