Skies the limit when it comes to deficit expanding tax cuts. The GOP formula is simple: tax cuts may not create jobs or reduce the deficit, what many would consider a failed policy, but the answer is always “cut spending.” The new tea party congress has taken this formula to a whole new level.
What has amazed me is the media silence on their plan. When will the reporters catch on and inform Americans that the Republicans are intentionally trying to run up the debt so they can push their tax cut agenda?
Bloomberg News: Incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told reporters “I think you can sum up what our new majority is going to be about by saying it is a cut-and-grow majority,” Cantor said. “You’ll see the cut-and-grow playbook begin to take hold over … House Republicans, in one of their first acts in the majority, plan to vote today to weaken the chamber’s anti-deficit budgeting rules to make it easier to approve tax cuts even if they add to the government’s financial shortfall. The new House rules would allow Congress to permanently extend former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, now set to expire in 2012, and extend the estate tax and the alternative- minimum tax without having to find equivalent savings.
Republicans also will allow a vote next week to repeal the administration’s health-care overhaul without offsetting the financial effect.
The revised rules would exempt most tax-cut proposals the Republicans intend to push from being financed with offsetting savings elsewhere in the government’s budget. Proposed spending increases, though, still would still face the offset requirement … spending increases could only be defrayed with cuts in other areas, not tax increases.
Budget watchdogs blasted the rule changes, saying that with them Republicans were reneging on campaign promises to cut the federal deficit.
Representative Mike Ross, an Arkansas Democrat and a member of the party’s fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, said pay-go “has been successful in the past because it treats all spending the same -- if it adds to the deficit, it has to be paid for. Period. This rules package threatens to undermine” the efforts to reduce the deficit.
Bob Bixby, head of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, a Washington-based group that promotes balanced budgets, said, “I don’t know what’s worse: setting up a pay-as-you-go rule and then ignoring it or saying we are just going to tell you what our hypocrisies are right up front.”
Taking the “alternate reality” thing one step further, Paul Ryan is now deciding the real world is all wrong:
The health plan is projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to save $143 billion over the next 10 years. Ryan said those savings are phony.
Welcome to the dictatorship.
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