Do the Math
The new budget proposal contains much bally-hooed cuts to 150 programs, which just shows how serious the President is about cutting spending and bringing down the deficit.
Will these cuts pass? It's unlikely, since many of them were picked from the list of programs with the strongest lobbies and Congressional sponsors. In fact, the Washington Post quotes a Congressional source as saying that no more than two dozen of these 150 cuts is likely to happen. Which explains why Bush is comfortably proposing things that might bite red-staters, like cutting farm subsidies. As Dana Carvey might say, when impersonating W's dad, "Not...Gonna...Happen."
But what if it did? What if all these cuts to spending happened? Would it make a dent in the deficit? The New York Times reports that, if they passed, these proposed cuts would take a whopping $15 billion out of a budget proposal that still totals $2.57 trillion.
Compare that to the 10-year cost of making Bush's tax cuts permanent: $1.8 trillion.
OK, so, maybe it's me, but if I were thinking about cuts to discretionary spending to get out of debt, I'd think the first step would be to NOT give back any money I already had coming to me.
The whole reason these tax cuts weren't made permanent in the first place was that some people said "Whoa! Won't these cause the deficit to balloon? What if we need the money for an emergency, like, say, a war? Can't we just try them out, and see what happens, so we can change course later?" Maybe we should acknowledge that, as it turns out, we could use the money, and say, "Sorry, rich folks, but you'll have to go back to paying those taxes at the old rate, not the discount one."
To add insult to injury, the new budget proposes new tax cuts, to the tune of $23 billion in the next five years and $117 billion through 2015. (Seems like we could just keep those taxes, and save the Hubble telescope, pay for some more local cops, and keep teaching kids to read.)
Though maybe it isn't that important. After all, we really knocked out the deficit we had in the 1990's, so how hard could it be to do that again? What do the experts say?
Will these cuts pass? It's unlikely, since many of them were picked from the list of programs with the strongest lobbies and Congressional sponsors. In fact, the Washington Post quotes a Congressional source as saying that no more than two dozen of these 150 cuts is likely to happen. Which explains why Bush is comfortably proposing things that might bite red-staters, like cutting farm subsidies. As Dana Carvey might say, when impersonating W's dad, "Not...Gonna...Happen."
But what if it did? What if all these cuts to spending happened? Would it make a dent in the deficit? The New York Times reports that, if they passed, these proposed cuts would take a whopping $15 billion out of a budget proposal that still totals $2.57 trillion.
Compare that to the 10-year cost of making Bush's tax cuts permanent: $1.8 trillion.
OK, so, maybe it's me, but if I were thinking about cuts to discretionary spending to get out of debt, I'd think the first step would be to NOT give back any money I already had coming to me.
The whole reason these tax cuts weren't made permanent in the first place was that some people said "Whoa! Won't these cause the deficit to balloon? What if we need the money for an emergency, like, say, a war? Can't we just try them out, and see what happens, so we can change course later?" Maybe we should acknowledge that, as it turns out, we could use the money, and say, "Sorry, rich folks, but you'll have to go back to paying those taxes at the old rate, not the discount one."
To add insult to injury, the new budget proposes new tax cuts, to the tune of $23 billion in the next five years and $117 billion through 2015. (Seems like we could just keep those taxes, and save the Hubble telescope, pay for some more local cops, and keep teaching kids to read.)
Though maybe it isn't that important. After all, we really knocked out the deficit we had in the 1990's, so how hard could it be to do that again? What do the experts say?
Through most of the 1990's, government spending grew at a snail's pace. But government spending soared during President Bush's first term and is expected to keep growing rapidly as the nation's baby boomers start to claim old-age benefits.Just do the math.
In the 1990's, the biggest jump in revenues came from high-income taxpayers who made enormous profits in the stock market bubble that ended in 2000. But Mr. Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 reduced rates on the wealthiest taxpayers and cut in half the taxes on dividends and capital gains, making it all but impossible for revenues to rise at a substantially faster pace than economic growth.
posted by Paul at 8:23 AM |
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