Even with Warren Buffett’s new tax policy idea, wherein he’d pay a higher tax rate, the continuing deficit dwarfs it.
Once again, the issue is not that we’re taking in too little in taxes. We can’t take in enough to cover the deficits. We must start cutting spending in a serious way.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Actually, we would do a good job of reducing the next decade’s deficit to near zero if we just reverse the Bush tax cuts… all of them. We were growing like crazy during the end of the Clinton years, despite the prevailing taxes. And, it’s not as if they made any discernable difference in our rate of growth since 2001, right?
It’s a strange notion, I agree, one that doesn’t get any play in politics today: use the means at hand to pay your darn bills.
The problem that the chart shows is that the increase in revenue is a pittance compared to the *new* debt that will be incurred. We could tax the rich who make over $1 million during the year at 100% and barely make a dent in this crushing debt.
Contrary to your suggesting, higher taxes are *always* suggested as the way to pay the bills. Painfully rare is the suggesting that we actually cut spending so we don’t incur these impossible-to-pay bills. Not just cut the spiraling growth rate; actually cut spending. That’s what doesn’t get play these days.
The bills are not impossible to pay, going forward. Just repeal every tax cut passed since January 2001, and in a couple of years revenues and expenditures will be a near match, according to projections I’ve seen.
Of course, the Buffett tax would not be a major piece of that rebalancing. Two thirds of the tax cuts went to the middle class, assuming you we can agree on whatever defines that group. The other third went to the top 5% of earners, with life getting progressively sweeter for the topmost .01%. Talking about that little group as though they will balance the budget, as Obama seems to imply, is a deceit. However, talking about the government we need as if it is something that we can’t afford and will be our ruin, as Paul Ryan does, is similarly inaccurate.
Also, treating the emergency spending of the Bush and Obama administrations to counter the financial collapse of 2007-2008 as though it were an optional, reckless expense is wrong, too.
I’d like to see those projections. Especially since annual deficits just keep going up. (The last time spending was in line with income, Newt Gingrich was running the House, which holds the power of the purse.)
Of course, the Buffett tax would not be a major piece of that rebalancing. That’s just what I said; it can’t do it. But it’s been touted in the media as a solution that rich people like Buffett (allegedly) want. And thus the graph that shows this is just a ruse by Buffett and the complicit media.
The emergency spending by Bush and Obama, regardless of how necessary it was, still needs to be paid back. If we had more sane spending levels before that, and saved for a rainy day, then emergency spending wouldn’t be killing us like it has.
And Ryan isn’t saying that government isn’t something we cant’t afford. He’s saying government without a sane spending plan and where there is no fiscal discipline, is something we can’t afford. He’s trying to restore that discipline, or at least make actual progress towards it, with real cuts rather than the fake “cuts” in the rate of growth that DC loves to pretend is actual discipline.
Follow-up: Obama admits the rule is (and I quote) “a gimmick”.