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Those Unseen Spending Commitments
The real cost of government in this country is being glossed over in statements of public officials and in news stories about federaUspending. It is being buried in current debates over whether the $80 billion or so the President proposes be spent in fi*al 1961 is enough. Public attention is centered on current outlays, but what the public doesn’t know is that spending commitments of $700 billion lie beneath the surface.
This figure of $700 billion in unseen spending commitments was revealed in an article trat appeared in a recent issue of “Nation’s Business’’ magazine, which emphasizes the dangers of spending momentum built into the fiscal process over a period of years. The current budget of some $80 billions is sobering enough, but future commitments that we keep adding can be downright frightening when totaled up.
As the article points out, today’s bills and next vear’s estimates are important. But the really meaningful figures are the incasing commitments and unknown ultimate costs of government spending. What it amounts to is that, to a large degree, spending has slipped beyond the control of federal policy-makers and everyone else, to the point that abrupt policy changes to save vast sums of money are now almost impossible because money is already committed.
The long-run impact of United States spending decisions made todav, savs the article, can be appreciated only with a knowledge of the following., little-publicized entanglements that are the real story behind the budget.
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