{"id":13941,"date":"2007-12-16T10:45:31","date_gmt":"2007-12-16T15:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13941.html"},"modified":"2007-12-16T10:45:31","modified_gmt":"2007-12-16T15:45:31","slug":"republicans-writing-checks-their-administration-cant-cash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/republicans-writing-checks-their-administration-cant-cash\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans writing checks their administration can’t cash"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quick quiz: what’s going to cost the U.S. more over the next decade: the exploding costs of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare or Bush’s tax cuts? Despite all the talk we hear about the prior, it’s not even close<\/a> — the tax cuts are poised to cost the treasury far, far, more.<\/p>\n

And yet, every Republican presidential candidate in the field, to a man, vows to make each of Bush’s cut permanent, beyond their scheduled expiration in 2010. As the NYT’s<\/em> Tom Redburn notes today<\/a>, over the next 10 years, it will cost “roughly $2.5 trillion in revenues now expected under current law. And that’s just the beginning.”<\/p>\n

Even without taking on any additional tasks, merely meeting the government’s existing obligations — mostly to pay for the military and to keep up with the health care and retirement needs of the elderly — would send the budget deficit soaring, pushing overall federal debt held by the public from under 50 percent of the size of the nation’s economy today to over 300 percent by 2050.<\/p>\n

“The combination of roughly constant revenues and significantly rising expenditures would quickly create an unstable fiscal situation,” the [Congressional Budget Office] report notes alarmingly, but in its characteristically dry and understated manner.<\/p>\n

How would the Republican candidates deal with this problem? Most say they would try to hold down spending — and cut taxes even more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Keep in mind, most of the GOP field, including Rudy Giuliani<\/a> and John McCain<\/a>, are on record believing in the Tax Fairy — tax cuts can pay for themselves with increased revenue. It’s transparent nonsense<\/a>, but it helps explain why the Republican field doesn’t even pretend to care about fiscal sanity.
\n
\nThe notion that Republicans would even consider additional tax cuts, on top of the reckless and irresponsible cuts from Bush’s first term, apparently stems from a political necessity.<\/p>\n

[R]ather than delivering any additional benefit that voters can actually take to the bank, carrying out such a pledge [of making Bush’s cuts permanent] would do nothing more than maintain the status quo. Nobody’s taxes would be cut further; they would at best stay the same. There’s not as much political payoff in that.<\/p>\n

And preventing anybody from being worse off is going to be incredibly costly. Indeed, it requires running faster and faster just to stay in the same place. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office on the long-term budget outlook, delivered to Congress on Thursday, makes clear the depth of the fiscal hole the next president will inherit from President Bush.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The GOP field sees this and thinks, “What America really needs is even more cuts! Without even pretending to come up with a plan to pay for them!”<\/p>\n

When Republicans wonder why no one takes them seriously anymore on matters of public policy, this should offer a big hint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quick quiz: what’s going to cost the U.S. more over the next decade: the exploding costs of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare or Bush’s tax cuts? Despite all the talk we hear about the prior, it’s not even close — the tax cuts are poised to cost the treasury far, far, more. And yet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}