"Paygo rules" are not a solution, at least not by themselves. The entitlement spending is problematic under any rules, except rules that contain its growth. Just putting in place a "paygo rule", either means it will be bypassed, ignored or revoked, or that your putting in place political cover for tax increases, neither one will resolve the problem.
Having most of the budget consist of fairly rapidly growing programs that automatically increase without any additional budget authority or congressional action of any kind, is a recipe for disaster no matter what type of budgeting rules you put in place.
There isn't enough other spending to squeeze out through budgeting rules (even assuming the rules remained in place when the squeeze got hard), to make up for the future increases built in to entitlements.
If entitlements where subject to potential discipline * of the budgeting process, having to fight in out with every other program, and with increases not being automatic, than maybe paygo rules might have a major impact, but I think under those circumstance the paygo rules would be likely to be repealed in fairly short order once they start to bite.
* "potential discipline" because its not as if the budget process has generally resulted in a lot of discipline on spending so far |
