Setting Budget Priorities: Can’t Dance, Too Wet To Plow, And The Fish Ain’t Bitin’*

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An old expression helps explain why our elected officials might as well turn to cultural warfare rather than tackle our long-term federal budget problems and set national priorities for the 21^st century.

They’ve told us, “Can’t dance, too wet to plow, and the fish ain’t bitin’,” or, more precisely, “Don’t have a plan, too politically dangerous to address, and my opponents ain’t willin’. In that sense, President Biden’s 2025 fiscal budget differs little from his recent predecessors.

Don’t have a plan. Reading through every recent president’s State of the Union makes clear that none has an overarching strategy for how we as a nation move into the future. Nor, for that matter, even how to organize and devise a plan. Yes, there are dribs and drabs for favorite projects and clients here and there, some worthy and some not. However, few of these short-term efforts fit into some longer-term strategy of where we should head or why.

Too wet to plow. The timing isn’t right to address long-term issues, we’re told, just as it hasn’t been for a few decades. Yet we’ve known about such problems as the impact of the baby boom retirement on Social Security and Medicare since at least the 1980s and still haven’t done anything about it. Of course, the timing is never right when making tough political decisions.

The fish ain’t bitin’. Congress is in a shambles. It can’t even pass a normal budget. Since budgetary reform, even in a sustainable budget, requires creating both winners and losers, the president needs support from Congress, and Congress needs the president to be willing to share the kickback from voters devoted to the status quo.

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O.K. To be fair, the field is very wet. A well-developed and balanced set of recommendations would be political suicide at election time. It requires short-run sacrifices—lower benefit growth rates and higher taxes—to make a better tomorrow.

And the fish ain’t bitin’. Congress can’t even pass legislation on which most of their members agree. Bickering and fighting have replaced the bipartisanship necessary for good government, and a broader effort to address long-run issues requires governing institutions that function well.

But the real kicker is that neither Congress nor the Executive Branch can dance. There is no semblance of a plan or how to develop a good one. Without a plan and some ideas of where we are going, it’s unclear how small-bore or even worthy temporary actions, like developing alternative energy sources, fit into a sustainable budget that promotes inclusive growth.

True long-term reform requires big trade-offs to be addressed within a workable process. As much as I would like any organizational effort, whether through a commission, Treasury study, or other process, to pursue those trade-offs, it’s not simply a matter of stacking up some set of deficit-reducing options to attain some budgetary goal for national debt. There needs to be some integrated vision for the overall direction of government and how it affects all segments of society. Deficit reduction is hardly the government’s primary purpose; a sustainable debt merely constrains how quickly and well the government can pursue broader purposes.

Here are two examples:

• Spending more on the elderly, children, or the working class invariably involves deciding how to adjust over time for which age groups have the greatest needs or opportunities for the dollars that will be allocated. Current budget numbers reveal that children remain scheduled to be an ever-lower priority—not just because of the higher debt they inherit but also because of the gradual decline in their share of government spending. Proposals such as the President’s to increase the child credit only for a couple of years do little to alter that long-term path.

• Social Security and Medicare benefits for retirees remain scheduled to drop drastically when the trust funds run out. The President’s proposals over time, including his proposed budget for 2025, suggest, at best, a delay of a few years in that day of reckoning. Consequently, his budget proposal suggests that all future growth in government spending should soon go only for Social Security, healthcare, and rising interest costs on that debt.

Despite broad pessimism about the government’s ability to do anything, the harm from failing to address our long-term issues will eventually force new legislation. Congress and the President, for instance, may one day find inaction on rising interest costs more dangerous politically than action. Without better preparation today, it is unlikely that they will know how to convert that force for change into an opportunity to create a much better tomorrow.

*This expression is examined on “A Way With Words, Bronx Cheer.”