{"id":7490,"date":"2006-05-23T13:41:09","date_gmt":"2006-05-23T17:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7490"},"modified":"2006-05-23T13:41:09","modified_gmt":"2006-05-23T17:41:09","slug":"bush-explains-his-approach-to-deficit-reduction-sort-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bush-explains-his-approach-to-deficit-reduction-sort-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush explains his approach to deficit reduction — sort of"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his speech<\/a> to the National Restaurant Association yesterday, the [tag]president[\/tag] almost<\/i> addressed the inherent contradiction between balancing the budget and making his irresponsible tax cuts permanent.<\/p>\n

“We’re absolutely committed to making the tax cuts permanent. The argument you’ll hear is, well, how can you possibly balance the budget if you make the [tag]tax cuts[\/tag] [tag]permanent[\/tag]? I guess the reverse of that is, we want to raise your taxes to [tag]balance[\/tag] the [tag]budget[\/tag]. Unfortunately, that’s not the way [tag]Washington[\/tag] works. The way Washington works is they will raise your taxes and figure out new ways to spend the money and not balance the budget.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Poor [tag]Bush[\/tag], he started off well and asked a pretty good rhetorical question. Too bad he didn’t — or couldn’t — answer it.<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, Bush is confused about “the way Washington works.” Cutting taxes does not<\/i> reduce spending<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Niskanen recently analyzed data from 1981 to 2005 and found….”no sign that deficits have ever acted as a constraint on spending.” To the contrary: judging by the last twenty-five years (plenty of time for a fair test), a tax cut of 1 percent of the GDP increases the rate of spending growth by about 0.15 percent of the GDP a year. A comparable tax hike reduces spending growth by the same amount. […]<\/p>\n

“I would like to be proven wrong,” says Niskanen. No wonder: for the modern conservative coalition, the implications of his findings are discomfiting, and in a sense tragic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or, as Kevin Drum put it<\/a>, “‘[tag]starve the beast[\/tag]’ doesn’t work. If you cut [tag]taxes[\/tag], all you do is encourage additional [tag]spending[\/tag].”<\/p>\n

It’s almost as if Bush is thinking, “It doesn’t work in practice, but maybe it’ll work in theory….”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his speech to the National Restaurant Association yesterday, the [tag]president[\/tag] almost addressed the inherent contradiction between balancing the budget and making his irresponsible tax cuts permanent. “We’re absolutely committed to making the tax cuts permanent. The argument you’ll hear is, well, how can you possibly balance the budget if you make the [tag]tax cuts[\/tag] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7490","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=7490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}