It's not an option either party is pushing, but letting the Bush tax cuts expire would put the United States close to balancing the budget by 2015, reports The Washington Post. "If we actually ended the Bus-era tax cuts, that would pretty much do it," Obama's former budget director, Peter Orszag, told CNN last week. Official budget estimates show that the goal could be accomplished in five years, not counting interest payments on national debt. By contrast, the Republican plan to renew the tax cuts would add almost $4 trillion to deficits by 2020, while President Obama's plan to extend cuts for all but the richest Americans would add $2 trillion.
Read original story in The Washington Post | Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010
Yeah, just like Clinton's budget projections survived the following administration's spending spree (the administration that expanded government more than any since Johnson's). "We can't be overdrawn: we still have checks!" And I've got some swamp land for sale, too...
ReplyDelete"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
-Yogi Berra-
C'mon, Fred. Do you really believe that "ending the tax cuts" (what an absurd characterization, as if it was rightfully government's money all along -- why isn't "increasing taxes to pay for ever-expanding government interference" rightly considered "curtailing liberty?") would somehow at last freeze further spending increases? That this would somehow finally be 'the tax increase to end all tax increases?' "OK, government, you've overspent your limit yet again. Here's another bailout. But I just know you'll act responsibly from now on..." Why is less theft and more justly earned wealth in people's pockets, to do with as THEY see fit, always considered a bad thing?
We need to stop continually enabling government metastasis and concomitant increased spending, which will always expand to consume whatever it can steal (taxes), plus whatever it can print (inflation, like issuing the new certificates for a stock split) or borrow (future taxes). And we simply don't need yet another demonstration that increasing the "steal" baseline again won't ever change that. Government will forever be chasing that dragon if we let it. At our expense.
The problem, as always, is the spending, not the revenue. As NH's Meldrim Thomson used to say, "Low taxes are the RESULT of low spending." Return to a Constitutionally authorized level of government. Voluntary free markets work better anyway.