I've been busy – I work for a living – so this is a little delayed.
How many times in listening to the news related to budgetary and fiscal matters have you heard someone say "leading to a savings (or shortfall) of [inserts huge number of trillions of dollars of your choosing here] over the next 10 years! Meanwhile, Congress has failed to enact a budget for the next fiscal year that begins this month, instead choosing to continue government operations under a short-term continuing resolution.
Put yourself back in 2000. Who among us foresaw a serious terrorist attack on American soil? Who among us foresaw we would undertake 2 separate wars incurring trillions of dollars of expenses, all on borrowed money? Who among us foresaw 2 separate stock market crashes, and a financial crisis requiring massive government intervention to prevent another great depression? Who among us would have foreseen three years and counting of high unemployment, reducing tax revenues?
Much of the work that I do has to do with creating plans that are intended to be implemented to deal with circumstances as they develop over very long periods, sometimes as much as the next 80 to 100 years. I believe in planning. I also know that projections are inherently limited by uncertainty. Planning must take such uncertainty into account, rather than locking in actions based on guesses. Most of the proposed planning and solutions producing the rhetoric of the moment does not have this characteristic, instead it treats what we pretend will be as real.
Uncertainty in connection with fiscal matters arises from many sources. The size of the economy, its relative growth rate, unexpected adverse events, the political will to impose appropriate taxes or reduce taxes, and so on. The only certainty is that any projection about where we will be 10 years from now is simply unlikely to prove true. The proper way to plan is to set a path based on best guesses, and adjust at each point when information validates our guesses or invalidates those guesses.
Let's start by making decisions about the circumstances we can ascertain; decisions about budgeted expenditures for this year, then proceeding to get ahead of the curve by planning and budgetary decisions for next fiscal year. I believe we should get ahead of the curve so when the next fiscal year begins, we are actually operating under a budget.
What do we know at this point that should be taken into account? We are on the precipice of another recessions or even depression; tax revenues are inadequate both for current operations and for currently funding known future obligations; trickle-down economics does not work; the way to facilitate growth is to allocate funds from financial savings and military consumption to true investment in infrastructure and education; and the accumulated debt of the United States must at some point be amortized in addition to providing for current needs.
By paying attention to that which we do know, we can make better decisions.