‘We’re going to need a bigger boat’ — our budget process is causing our fiscal problems

“Jaws,” the summer movie classic, serves as an allegory for our congressional budget process. I don’t say this because of the obvious parallel between the great white shark and debt eating us alive, but because of the similarity between Amity Island’s problem and our broken congressional budget process.

Fictional Amity Island is a lovely Cape Cod seaside town with a tourism-dependent economy. It also has a big problem: An aggressive man-eating shark arrives on the cusp of its summer season.

The problem is obvious with the first discovery of human remains. Both the police and the coroner recognize the wounds of a shark attack. Police Chief Brody swiftly comprehends the problem and prepares to close the beach, but Mayor Vaughn refuses to see the shark as the problem. He sees the reaction — the loss of tourism revenue — as the problem. He thus successfully pressures the coroner to say the death was a boating accident, ultimately causing further carnage.

In Washington, our shark is not the $41 trillion debt limit or $32 trillion of publicly held debt, as bad as those things are. Those are just consequences of our real problem. The real problem is the congressional budget process itself, which places little restraint on lawmakers’ spending and makes spending reform and reductions more difficult than they should be.

Before World War I, the U.S. ran annual deficits in 34 percent of all fiscal years. Since then, we have run deficits in 79 percent of fiscal years. Since adopting the modern budget process in 1974, we have........

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