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In the decade since the Tea Party Movement swept the United States, pledging to bring fiscal conservatism to Washington, D.C., government spending hasn’t slowed down much. In fact, it’s gotten significantly worse.
Economist Vance Ginn pointed to small victories that the Tea Party Movement was able to win, like the 2011 Budget Control Act, which slowed government spending for a short time, but he said that didn’t last long, and the government has gotten right back to growing.
Even during President Trump’s first term, with two years of a GOP majority in Congress, spending still grew. Ginn said, "You would think that with Republicans in there, there would be less spending, and that just didn’t happen. It’s very difficult to materialize desires to cut spending."
So why is it so hard to rein in federal spending? The answer lies in what your tax dollars are actually being spent on, which is primarily expensive entitlement programs. Ginn said, "Social Security and Medicare, in particular, are very difficult to touch politically speaking. And they’ve been growing faster than many other areas of the budget."
Right now, reforming these programs is still on the table, but as the national debt continues to grow, things are eventually going to reach a breaking point. Ginn said, "I think at some point, politicians have to wake up to the reality that we have got to get our budget under control, and the only way to do that is to do something with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid."