Following the failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) criticized liberals for insisting that any deal include a massive tax hike. In a speech at Heritage last week, he said tax revenue isn’t the problem facing the United States in the future; it’s the massive increase in federal spending. “It’s actually arithmetically impossible to solve this problem on the tax side alone,” said Toomey, who noted that Democrats on the Super Committee wanted to hike taxes by $1 trillion without making any fundamental reforms …
Liberals stumping for tax cuts are as rare as three-dollar bills and hardcover digital books, and for good reason. Devoid of any other organizing principle, the only job of progressivism today is to grow government, and taxation is the blood stream of government. It is thus with the same healthy does of skepticism that we would greet a talking turtle that we should approach claims by the Obama White House that it really, really wants to cut taxes, dang it, but conservatives won’t let them. The issue at hand is, …
The Super Committee failed to meet its Thanksgiving to cut $1.2 Trillion from the federal budget. Now what? Click here to join our live “Lunch with Heritage” online chat. We are joined by Heritage’s Director of Economic Policy Studies Alison Fraser. She is taking your questions about why the Super Committee failed, the next steps, and what they should focus on. Lunch with Heritage feat. Alison Fraser
Tax hikes were the focal point of the contentious, failed supercommittee negotiations designed to reduce the national debt by at least $1.2 trillion. Democrats wanted massive tax hikes. Republicans flirted with a tax reform deal lowering rates and closing loopholes. But the fact that tax hikes were at the center of the debate indicates that the committee – which includes Michigan Reps. Dave Camp and Fred Upton – fails to grasp the true nature of our debt crisis. Overspending, especially on entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, is …
With the failure of the super committee to recommend at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, Congress’s latest attempt at budget control has collapsed. There will be many analyses of why the process did not work, but it’s worth stepping back to recall what generated the need for this extraordinary procedure and what the exercise actually produced. From early in the year, it was generally accepted that the divided Congress would be unable to agree on a budget through regular procedures. Republicans chose to use a necessary vote on the …
The congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, called the Supercommittee, announced today that it has failed to meet its statutory duty to recommend deficit reduction to Congress. But the overspending problem is still here. Congress does not get to quit on the American people or stall for more time. Congress must still act to get federal spending under control, in a thoughtful, intelligent manner that meets the needs of the American people. Mindless across-the-board cuts to government spending — especially cuts that gut the nation’s defenses when America already …
In 1969, as President Nixon’s Domestic Policy Council sought ways to spend the forthcoming “peace dividend”—savings projected from the wind-down of the Vietnam War—council members ran into an inconvenient fact: The fiscal windfall did not exist; any post-war “savings” were already committed to a range of new spending, including some of the blossoming Great Society programs of the previous Administration. It was the first time total government spending did not decline after a war. Today, some members of the congressional “super committee” want to go back to the future—by spending …
Where can Congress’ “super committee” find its $1.2-trillion target in savings? The answer is hidden in plain sight. The money could come from Obamacare, to avoid implementing its huge expenses. Repealing the health care law would solve the super committee’s dilemma, yielding more than enough savings to fulfill their mission. Yet Obamacare has been placed “off-limits” for no good reason. As POLITICO noted: “Anyone tracking the super committee has heard the mantra: Everything is on the table. But there’s one big item that doesn’t appear to be on that gigantic …
This week, the U.S. national debt clock hit a nightmarish milestone: a record $15 trillion. Words can’t even begin to describe the scope of borrowed federal spending, but it is no doubt a staggering figure that has risen dramatically in the last decade and is more than $4 trillion higher than when President Barack Obama took office less than three years ago. Unfortunately, Washington does not appear poised to take action to rectify the problem, and those with their hands on the wheel are ignoring the root of the problem: spending. …
What’s a supercommittee to do? Total national debt just hit a new record at $15 trillion, an increase of approximately $700 billion since the Supercommittee’s August inception. Hard as its members try, they just do not seem to be able to deliver the required $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction measures. The situation has deteriorated so badly that even some Republicans are offering up tax hikes. While this is precisely the wrong solution, it has created another insidious problem. Squabbles over the size of tax hikes are overshadowing the more vital …
