MEGAN MCARDLE: Spending Cuts, Now Or Never?

One thing that I hear over and over from my conservative interlocutors on the budget is that they need spending cuts right now because they just don’t trust the Democrats (or indeed the Republicans) to make spending cuts in the future. If they don’t get the cuts now, the reasoning goes, it will be “jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow, but never jam today.”

I certainly understand the worry, especially after Democrats and their own leadership pulled the cute trick of enacting a bunch of sham spending cuts in the last round of negotiations. But here’s the question: why do you think spending cuts now will be any more likely to stick than spending cuts tomorrow? Anything you enact now, under threat of the debt ceiling, can always be un-enacted tomorrow.

Oh, sure, default would make it pretty hard to borrow money to fund new spending. But what makes you think they won’t raise taxes to fund new spending instead? You cannot credibly bind future congresses to your will.

Yeah, not even the Constitution does a very good job of that.