The impossible dream.

• Author: Weidenbaum, Murray
• Position: National Affairs - Management of government spending and the federal budget

"... A really effective way to control government expenditures is to reduce the amount that Congress appropriates to the spending agencies in the first place."

THE U.S. NEEDS to break the political logjam on cutting the mammoth Federal budget. It will take the application of several basic lessons learned from past experience in both Democratic and Republican administrations. The lessons may be easy to understand but, in reality, they are very difficult to apply.

Lesson 1: Know what you are doing. A little modesty surely will help. An effective budget cutter must learn the nitty-gritty of how to make good budget decisions--too bad some of the loudest voices in the ongoing budget debate have skipped this vital point.

Lesson 2: Be prepared to do a lot of hard work. None of it is glamorous, and some of the detailed labor is really boring. Save the oratory for later.

Lesson 3: Get ready to unlearn some of the "facts" or "truths" that you bring to the table.

Lesson 4: We have to defer this last and very important lesson until we deal adequately with the first three.

We can start with the popular--and useful--idea that reducing Federal outlays is like cutting back on your credit card spending. It is, but with a slight twist. To be effective, you cannot wait until the bank sends you a monthly statement letting you know that you already have maxed out your credit card before taking action on your family's spending spree. More important, you should not try to tell the bank that you are not going to pay the flail amount you owe because the family is spending more money than it should.

However, that is how the national debate on the budget has been going, especially concerning the debt ceiling. Many readers may be turned off at this point because they associate weakness on the issue of the debt ceiling as a failure of resolve on the spending issue. Here is where Lesson 3 comes into play. Really experienced budgeters--I started in 1949 with the old Bureau of the Budget, precursor to today's Office of Management and Budget--will tell you that you have missed the most effective point of controlling spending if you wait until the Treasury Department requests a rise in the debt ceiling. After all, that means that the merchandise ordered by the spending agencies already has arrived and that the people they have hired already are on the job.

That leads us back to Lesson 1: if you do not permit the government to pay for the stuff it already has received and is using, it is just like refusing to pay the bank for the shopping you already have completed. There is no way of avoiding the painful troth: if you (or Uncle Sam) do not pay the bills you already have received, you and he are deadbeats.

(The Treasury already has suffered some of the cost of the uncertainty generated by the 2011 debate on increasing the debt ceiling. The nonpartisan Governmental Accountability Office estimates that delays in raising the debt limit in 2011 led to a $1,300,000,000 increase in Treasury's borrowing costs in fiscal year 2011 --and that is a low-ball estimate because it does not include the higher...