Editorial
The New York Times
December 29, 2010
On Dec. 22, just before they left town for the holidays, House Republican leaders released new budget rules that they intend to adopt when they assume the majority in January and will set the stage for even more budget-busting tax cuts.
The new Republican rules will gut pay-as-you-go because they require offsets only for entitlement increases, not for tax cuts.
It gets worse. The new rules mandate that entitlement-spending increases be offset by spending cuts only — and actually bar the House from raising taxes to pay for such spending.
Even worse, they direct the leader of the House Budget Committee to ignore several costs when computing the budget impact of future actions.
For example, the cost to make the Bush-era tax cuts permanent would be ignored, as would the fiscal effects of repealing the health reform law. At the same time, the new rules bar the renewal of aid for low-income working families — extended temporarily in the recent tax-cut deal — unless it is fully paid for.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/opinion/30thu1.html
Rules draft (33 pages):
http://rules-republicans.house.gov/Media/PDF/112-Hres5-CP_xml.pdf
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Although long, the new Republican rules for the House of Representatives read somewhat like those jokes that are circulated around the Internet. When the fact sinks in that this is no joke but that these rules are very real, the inhumanity implicit in these new rules induces a feeling of despair.
Think of what these rules do for public funding of health care under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Because health insurance is too expensive and out-of-pocket costs are also unaffordable, government subsidies are necessary, but those called for in the act are inadequate. Many people who will need health care will face financial hardship unless the subsidies are increased.
Under the Republican rules, increases in these subsidies cannot be paid for by increasing taxes. Only reductions in other programs can be used. This is not unlike the prohibited act of cannibalizing one military vehicle to get another one up and running, when both vehicles are essential. Just as we have a responsibility to pay our taxes, our government has a responsibility to ensure that appropriate publicly-financed services will be there when needed, whether it’s maintaining our military vehicles, supporting transportation services in major snowstorms, or ensuring that everyone always has access to affordable health care.
Although the Republicans display a decidedly uncaring attitude toward the financing of important public services shared by most of us, they have an almost sacred devotion to protecting higher-income individuals from the need to pay their equitable share of the taxes to fund those services.
Any increases in spending for the public good must be offset by reductions in other services that would then no longer be available for the public good. Yet, under the new Republican rules, any tax reductions which would accrue primarily to the benefit of the wealthy do not have to be offset at all. Instead, those deficits are added to our debt burden and the debt burden passed on to our progeny.
Is the tax burden in the United States so great that we must sacrifice our public services while burdening ourselves with more debt simply to provide tax relief for the wealthy? The following chart provides that answer. The United States has one of the lowest tax burdens of all nations. The Republicans are catering to the rich at a great cost to the rest of us. What is really tragic is that it seems that, rather than electing representatives who care, the American voters would rather attend tea parties.
If the following OECD chart was not transmitted in this message, it can be accessed by scanning down to Chart A at this link:
http://www.oecd.org/document/35/0,3343,en_2649_37427_46661795_1_1_1_37427,00.html
Total tax ratio as percentage of GDP, 2008