by Deroy Murdock at The Daily Signal
Fiscal conservatives lately have argued that the federal government should spend as it did before COVID-19 ruined everything.
Thankfully, the global pandemic is a speck in the rearview mirror. Only a few diehards cling bitterly to their masks and grow misty with lockdown nostalgia.
Restoring spending to its trajectory in fiscal year 2019—the last before COVID-19 wandered out of China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology—could be treacherous, even for die-hard budget hawks.
January 2025’s domestic discretionary baseline for fiscal year 2026 is $1.897 trillion. In August 2019, it was $1.332 trillion. Adopting the latter would require a one-year, $565 billion spending cut. Similar hefty disbursement reductions would continue every year thereafter. Such belt-tightening would hurt. The Congressional Budget Office would have to hire a staff anesthesiologist.
Why not roll spending back to the future? A less painful target would be the outlay totals that CBO foreshadowed for today—but in summer 2019. Congress should write checks at the pace that CBO anticipated for fiscal year 2026, before Earth shut down and massive expenditures for ventilators, vaccines, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the American Rescue Plan Act drained the Treasury…
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