A GOP Budget That Is Truly an ‘Ideological Document’
By Alan S. Blinder
Something momentous—sort of—happened last month, but you may not have heard about it. Both the House and the Senate passed a budget resolution for fiscal 2016, which starts on Oct. 1. That’s a step, though only a step, along the long and winding road to an actual budget—an achievement which, while arguably Congress’s most basic function, has eluded our legislators for years. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the budget resolution has no chance of being enacted... As House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R., Ga.) put it, “budgets are ideological documents.” .. If you look inside the Republican proposal, you’ll find a number of things that even the GOP’s presidential standard-bearer, whoever he is, might be wary of.
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First—and this will not surprise you—100% of the job is done by cutting spending, with no additional tax revenue whatsoever. While the resolution calls for “a fairer, simpler tax code,” the details fall outside the jurisdiction of the budget committees, and they count zero revenue from this source. Presumably, any new revenue raised by closing loopholes would be devoted to cutting tax rates.
So where do the roughly $5.5 trillion in budget cuts (over 10 years) come from? The biggest item by far, accounting for 37% of all the spending reductions, is abolishing ObamaCare. Yes, congressional Republicans want to vote to repeal the president’s most prized initiative—again. Of course, this will not happen unless the Supreme Court does the job for them. Otherwise, getting rid of ObamaCare is, at the earliest, a 2017 agenda item that will require, at minimum, electing a Republican president and 60 Republican senators in November 2016. Well, it’s an ideological document.
But arithmetic won’t bow to ideology. The Republican budget takes credit for about a $2 trillion reduction in spending from repealing ObamaCare. But it ignores the roughly $1 trillion in additional revenue that ObamaCare is estimated to bring in from added taxes and fees by 2025. If you eliminate the program, you lose the revenue, too.
Beyond repealing ObamaCare, the Republican budget seeks to save an additional $2 trillion-plus by imposing pretty severe cuts on other entitlement programs—mainly Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (the name for food stamps), and other programs that benefit mostly low- and moderate-income Americans. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that at least 63% of the nondefense budget cuts come from such programs. Gee, I thought America had recently discovered an inequality problem, and that even Republicans were bothered by it. Maybe not.
More..
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gop-budget-that-is-truly-an-ideological-document-1434669584
