The Wall Street Journal has an editorial up echoing criticisms I made of the Democrats’ Paygo plan yesterday.

Supporters of paygo claim it will help restrain entitlement spending. It won’t. Paygo doesn’t apply to current entitlements that will grow automatically over the next several decades. Ms. Pelosi’s version of paygo applies only to new entitlements or changes in law that expand current programs. And on present trajectory, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps and the like are scheduled to increase federal spending to almost 38% of GDP by 2050, up from 21% today. Paygo won’t stop a dime of that increase. This may explain why one of the leading supporters of paygo is the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal outfit that favors far more social spending.

Paygo enthusiasts also claim that when these rules were in effect in the 1990s the budget deficit disappeared and by 2001 the budget recorded a $121 billion surplus. Sorry. The budget improvement in the late 1990s was a result of three events wholly unrelated to paygo: the initial spending restraint under the Republican Congress in 1995 and 1996 as part of their pledge to balance the budget; a huge reduction in military spending, totaling nearly 2% of GDP, over the decade; and rapid economic growth, which always causes a bounce in revenues. Paygo didn’t expire until 2002, but by the late-1990s politicians in both parties were already re-stoking the domestic spending fires.

What paygo does restrain are tax cuts, by requiring that any tax cut be offset dollar-for-dollar with some entitlement reduction. Congressional budgeteers always overestimate the revenue losses from tax cuts, which under paygo would require onerous budget cuts to “pay for” the tax cuts. As a political matter, those spending cuts will never happen.

Read the whole thing.

In addition to these criticisms, there is also the fact that there are several loopholes in Pelosi’s version of Paygo that will still allow significant spending increases while making tax relief more difficult.  Spending cuts aimed at offsetting proposed new spending under Paygo rules can be “future” cuts.  Meaning that a politician can get new spending passed under Paygo simply by promising to cut other types of spending in the future.

With history as our guide, these future cuts rarely happen.

As I said in my previous post, Paygo is a fraud.  It is a meaningless political slogan.  It is a smokescreen put out by spend-happy liberals who want to appear fiscally responsible without actually having to be fiscally responsible.