Republican leaders and others on the right were quick to pounce on the alarming news that the federal budget deficit this hear is headed to a stunning $1.5 trillion. But few had anything to say about their role in jacking that number up by $409 billion in this year alone. http://bit.ly/eiYupT
"It’s clear the President and his team haven’t gotten the message the American people sent in November: we can’t spend and borrow our way to prosperity," Speaker John Boehner said after the debt numbers came out.
The National Republican Congressional Committee blasted e-mails hammering numerous Democrats, including Long Island's Carolyn McCarthy and Tim Bishop, blaming them for the alaming number.
"Unfortunately for those Americans craving fiscal sanity from their leaders in Washington, Tim Bishop [fill in the blank] on Tuesday joined the Democratic Party establishment in opposing efforts to reduce federal spending to 2008 levels," the NRCC said. "Just hours later, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced Wednesday morning that the federal budget deficit widened to $1.5 trillion, mounting additional debt upon the backs of already struggling middle-class families. Bishop and his fellow Democrats have demonstrated they lack the commitment necessary to halt the impending fiscal catastrophe."
Even more adamant were the outside groups, like the Americans for Limited Government.
"Once again, the budget deficit is growing under Obama's watch, this time to $1.5 trillion, mostly because of the unpaid-for $56 billion extension of unemployment benefits and a $120 billion cut in payroll taxes on employees from December's tax deal," said the group's president, Bill Wilson. "Because there were no offsetting spending cuts for these items, we are just digging ourselves deeper into a hole of a debt that surely will hinder the economy for some time to come."
Wilson is just plain wrong, according to the CBO numbers. The tax-cut deal that the GOP insisted on at the end of last year adds $409 billion to the deficit this year. The numbers he mentions are accurate, but at $176 billion, that's much less than half. He is ignoring the impact of extending the Bush-era tax cuts, as well as a number of small business and corporate tax breaks. Mind you, Democrats wanted some of those, too.
But Wilson concludes, "It is now up to House Republicans to put serious spending cuts on the table."
Perhaps. But CBO boss Douglas Elmendorf also offered an estimate of how much Congress could save by rolling back spending to 2008 levels -- $82 billion. That doesn't come close to balancing out $409 billion in deficit hikes that the GOP voted for just a month ago.
And Elmendorf noted that the problem is probably worse than the CBO can say. Under current law and tax policy, the federal debt would grow by about $7 trillion over 10 years. But Elmendorf noted that it is very likely lawmakers will vote for more by trying to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts, fix the adjusted minimum tax that gets adjusted itself every year, and keep on fixing the too-low Medicare payments to doctors. If they do, it would hike the federal debt by more like $12 trillion.
And it would almost certainly be completely bipartisan -- not that you would know that from the GOP.
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