# David Wessel

David Meyer Wessel (born February 21, 1954) is an American journalist and writer. He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. He is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for 30 years.

## Quotes
### Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget (2012)

    All quotes from the hardcover first edition, ISBN 978-0-7704-3614-8, 2nd printing
    Italics and ellipsis as in the book. Bold face added for emphasis.
* In all, $1 of every $5 the federal government spent in 2011 went to defense, and about 20 cents of that $1 was spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
** Chapter 1, “Spending $400 Million an Hour” (p. 21)
* For every dollar the United States spends on the military, it spends another nickel on foreign aid, international development aid, and humanitarian assistance. Yet in a CNN poll in March 2011, the typical respondent estimated about 10 percent of the entire federal budget goes for “aid to foreign countries for international development and humanitarian assistance.” The reality: about 1 percent. That’s another problem with budgeting: the public makes woefully wrong assumptions about virtually every aspect of it.
** Chapter 1, “Spending $400 Million an Hour” (pp. 21-22)
* Eliminating the federal workforce entirely would have pared the federal budget deficit in 2011 by only one-third.
** Chapter 1, “Spending $400 Million an Hour” (p. 22)
* Nearly all the growth in the federal budget over the next ten years [2013-2022] is going to come from spending on healthcare and interest payments unless something changes. “You can’t fix this without doing health care,” says Paul Ryan. “I mean, health care is the driver of our debt.” And, as he and others routinely observe, even though the United States spends far more per person on health care than any other country, it isn’t close to having the world’s healthiest population.
** Chapter 1, “Spending $400 Million an Hour” (p. 24)
* The share of income most American families pay in federal taxes has been falling for more than thirty years. Today, Americans pay less of their income in taxes than citizens of nearly every other developed country.
** Chapter 1, “Spending $400 Million an Hour” (p. 26)
* Except for four unusual years at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, the federal government has spent more than it took in every year for the past four decades. It borrows the difference, essentially promising that taxpayers in the future will pick up the tab for government spending today.
** Chapter 1, “Spending $400 Million an Hour” (p. 29)
* “The fiscal path we are on today is simply not sustainable. These deficits that we are incurring on an annual basis are like a cancer, and they are truly going to destroy this country from within unless we have the common sense to do something about it. “We face the most predictable economic crisis in history.”
** Chapter 1, “Spending $400 Million an Hour” (p. 32; quoting Erskine Bowles)
* The federal government was smaller—4.3 percent of GDP in 1931—and narrower. About 70 percent of the spending went for three things: Defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest payments on the national debt. “The federal budget was not then, as it later became, a machine constantly generating new programs and expansions of old ones,” Herbert Stein wrote.
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (p. 38)
* “From the mid-1930s to the 1970s, the government made a set of commitments that led to expectations on the part of the American people about what their government owes them,” says Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “And they are totally unprepared to go back to a different world.”
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (p. 41)
* Adjusted for inflation, the federal government spent more on Medicare and Medicaid in 2011 than it spent on everything in 1960.
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (p. 44)
* In a city riddled with dysfunctional institutions, the CBO has become one of the few organs of Congress that actually work. It is the arbiter of facts, a call-it-as-we-see-it outfit that is viewed as largely immune to political pressure.
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (p. 45)
* The Reagan presidency was styled as a turning point in American politics: the end of the New Deal and the beginning of an era in which the government would retreat from the economy. Ronald Reagan made three significant fiscal promises during his campaign for president: cut taxes, rebuild the nation’s defenses, and balance the budget. He delivered on the first two, but not on the third.
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (p. 49)
* The 1980s broke a pattern in which the federal government ran big deficits only in wartime. The deficit topped $200 billion a year from 1983 through 1992. They would have been even bigger if Reagan hadn’t flinched on taxes, accepting significant tax increases in 1982 and 1984.
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (pp. 51-52)
* Reagan enjoyed many victories as president. But starving the beast was not one of them. When he left office, federal spending was 20 percent higher, adjusted for inflation, than it had been when he arrived, and he never found a way to pay for it. In the twenty years before Reagan became president—under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter—the budget deficit averaged well under 1 percent of GDP. In Reagan’s eight years, it averaged 4.25 percent of GDP.
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (p. 52)
* Panetta summed up Reaganomics in a single sentence: “A significant tax cut was enacted at the same time that defense spending went up and…entitlement programs were also expanding.”
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (p. 52)
* Bush was elected in 1988 with one memorable promise: “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Republican poster Richard Wirthlin once called them “the six most destructive words in the history of presidential politics.”
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (p. 52)
* Today, the idea that a president could appeal to a mixed-party center to win approval of any measure seems as quaint is a typewriter.
** Chapter 2, “How We Got Here” (p. 54)
* The overarching lesson: Bringing the deficit down to sustainable levels takes big changes. Little ones won’t do it.
** Chapter 3, “Where the Money Goes” (p. 70)
* The public remains strikingly misinformed about the budget. The typical respondent to a CNN poll said food stamps accounted for 10 percent of federal spending; it’s closer to 2 percent. Maybe being off by a factor of five is understandable given the enormity and complexity of the budget. But it’s harder to make sense of a 2008 Cornell University poll in which 44 percent of those who receive Social Security checks and 40 percent of those covered by Medicare say they “have not used a government social program.”
** Chapter 3, “Where the Money Goes” (p. 70)
* “Everyone thinks there’s a lot, but there’s nothing that a majority wants to cut. The average person doesn’t want less government. They just want the government to cost less.”
** Chapter 3, “Where the Money Goes” (p. 72; quoting Stan Collender)
* Until the Civil War, the U.S. government relied almost exclusively on tariffs on imported goods, a practice that provoked conflict between Northern manufacturers who favored tariffs to keep imports out and Southern farmers who did not. An income tax was imposed during the Civil War, but proved so unpopular that it died in 1872. In its place, the government imposed taxes on alcohol and tobacco that accounted for 43 percent of all federal revenue by 1900. Repeated attempts to revive the income tax were thwarted when the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1895. But the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution changed that. Less than eight months after it was ratified in February 1913, Congress enacted an income tax.
** Chapter 4, “Where the Money Comes From” (p. 104)
* “Tax reform”—the always popular, always politically treacherous goal of making the tax code simpler and smarter—“is really difficult when you can’t throw money at it. Losers always squeak louder than winners cheer.”
** Chapter 4, “Where the Money Comes From” (p. 109; quoting Jon Talisman)
* In the high-volume debate over taxes, facts about basic issues—who pays? how much? who doesn’t?—often get lost, twisted, or distorted. Perhaps the most salient and overlooked fact is this one: for most Americans, federal taxes have not risen over the past couple of decades.
** Chapter 4, “Where the Money Comes From” (p. 112)
* In response to years of calls to control “spending” and “smaller government,” Congress and presidents have discovered something simple: giving people a tax break—a credit, a loophole, a deduction—makes them happy without increasing government “spending” and can accomplish the same objective. Practically and economically, there’s no difference between getting $1,000 in cash from the government and getting a $1,000 voucher that you can use to reduce your taxes. Either results in a federal budget deficit that’s $1,000 bigger than it would have been had a tax break not been created. But the first is called “spending” (boos, hisses) and the second is called “a tax cut” (applause, cheers). The first is formally recorded on the budget books as an outflow of money. The second doesn’t show up in the outflow and inflow accounting. It is revenue that wasn’t collected.
** Chapter 4, “Where the Money Comes From” (pp. 122-123)
* In classical tragedy, this is known as the denouement. In Washington, it could be just farce.
** Chapter 5, “Why This Can’t Go On Forever” (p. 130)
* Back in 1955, when the federal debt was much smaller, less than 5 percent was held by foreigners. Foreign holdings began to climb in 1970 and surged in the 2000s. Today, foreign governments and private investors hold nearly half of all the U.S. government debt outstanding.
** Chapter 5, “Why This Can’t Go On Forever” (p. 136)
* Ultimately, what matters is where Congress and the president end up, not where they start. But defining the starting point and crafting the baseline are important to the politics and public perceptions of the budget—they are used by one side to magnify the size of the spending cuts or tax changes proposed by the other side—and politics and perceptions have a lot to do with what actually happens.
** Chapter 5, “Why This Can’t Go On Forever” (p. 142)
* No one really knows how much the U.S. government can borrow before global investors get uneasy and begin to demand higher interest rates. The national debt exceeded 100 percent of GDP during World War II and then came down as the economy sprinted. But history suggests debt of that level is in the danger zone. Think Argentina, circa 2001. Think Greece, circa 2012.
** Chapter 5, “Why This Can’t Go On Forever” (p. 143)