| Republicans are not threatening the debt ceiling because they want to balance the budget. The spending cuts that they are insisting on are offset by tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy that they are also insisting on. Their ultimate goal is to shift the cost of government from those who benefit the most to those who benefit the least. |
| House Republicans in effect outlined their starting position last week, when, amid the fight over 2011 spending, they unveiled their budget for the 2012 fiscal year and beyond. It would cut $6 trillion over 10 years, mostly from projected spending for Medicare and Medicaid.
But those savings would be offset by about $4 trillion in tax cuts. The result, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would be continued annual deficits until 2040 — necessitating more votes to raise the debt limit, even under House Republicans’ plan, for decades to come. Source: "Next on the Agenda for Washington: Fight Over Debt" By JACKIE CALMES - NY Times - April 9, 2011 [Paul Ryan,] the Wisconsin Republican who is the chairman of the House Budget Committee, [and the chief author of the Republican budget plan] voted for the U.S. bailout of Wall Street banks and the automobile industry, the No Child Left Behind education measure, the prescription-drug benefit for seniors The Congressional Budget Office suggests that eventually privatizing Medicare as Mr. Ryan’s plan advocates, with government “premium support” payments to insurance companies, will result in less coverage and higher costs for seniors. Many experts said his proposal to turn Medicaid, the health subsidy for poor people, into a block grant to states would reduce benefits for the most vulnerable members of society. In disputing those assertions, Mr. Ryan must demonstrate that he isn’t curbing U.S. spending on the backs of the poor, elderly and disabled. He loses that advantage if voters believe he’s advocating a massive transfer of wealth from lower and middle-income Americans to the most affluent and asking almost no shared sacrifice. When he takes any tax increases off the table and passionately defends measures like a more generous estate tax, which benefits the richest Americans, it makes that challenge difficult. His own long-term budget proposal calls for lowering the top tax rate to 25 percent for both corporations and individuals; corporations now are subject to a 35 percent top rate, for individuals it is 35 percent, slated to go up to 39.6 percent. […]the lowest for upper-income individuals since 1931 and for corporations since 1941 Source: "No Sharp Edges, but Big Scissors, for Republican Star" By ALBERT R. HUNT | BLOOMBERG NEWS (via NY Times) April 10, 2011 President George W. Bush won huge tax cuts for the wealthiest among us in the early 2000s. We were told that these tax cuts would spur investment and economic growth. But growth in investment and employment were slower in the years that followed than in any other economic recovery in the post-World War II era. Contrast this with the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton presided over tax increases. After those tax increases in 1993, investment and employment both grew faster than in the 2000s. And families ended the decade with more income than when they began, unlike in the 2000s, when families lost income over the economic recovery that peaked in 2007. Source: "What Tax Increases Do" by Heather Boushey - NY Times - Updated April 14, 2011, 11:13 AM |
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