Tag Archives: deficit

Trumpcare Still Hasn’t Been Sent to the Senate

by AntoineEichmann Posted on May 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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As we all know, the Republican health care bill can’t survive a Democratic filibuster, so it’s being considered via reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes in the Senate. That means the bill has to obey reconciliation rules.

Normally, this is not a big problem. If some aspect of the House bill violates the rules, it gets removed in the Senate and life goes on. But what if the bill violates the prime rule of reconciliation—namely that it reduce the deficit? Then it’s dead and everyone has to start all over. This means the House has to be pretty careful that their bill does indeed reduce the deficit.

But how do they know if it reduces the deficit? Easy: the CBO scores the bill and tells them. But Paul Ryan famously rushed passage of the bill in the House before CBO had time to deliver a score, so no one knows for sure if it still reduces the deficit. Bloomberg reports on what this means:

House Speaker Paul Ryan hasn’t yet sent the bill to the Senate because there’s a chance that parts of it may need to be redone, depending on how the Congressional Budget Office estimates its effects….”I had no idea,” Dennis Ross of Florida, another member of the vote-counting team, said Thursday, adding that the prospect of another vote “does concern me.” GOP leaders never said publicly they were planning to hold on to the bill for two weeks or longer.

In the end, I imagine the bill will get scored as a deficit reduction and then be sent to the Senate. But the fact that Ryan is still holding onto the bill shows that he knew perfectly well how irresponsible it was to force a vote before the CBO delivers a score. In addition to being callous and malignant, the whole thing is also a massive FUBAR.

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Trumpcare Still Hasn’t Been Sent to the Senate

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Donald Trump Obliterates the Deficit!

by OYGBridget Posted on February 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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Behold the echo chamber. Here is Gateway Pundit two days ago:

Here is Herman Cain this morning:

Here is Donald Trump shortly afterward:

The strangest thing about this is that…it’s true. I’m not really used to that from Trump. I guess accidents do happen, though.

Now, it’s also meaningless, and not just because Trump hasn’t actually done anything yet. The deficit bounces up and down monthly depending on how much the government happens to spend and how much tax revenue it takes in. For example, take a look at the following chart:

The month of April is shown in blue. Let’s make that into its own chart:

Impressive! During Obama’s presidency, he turned around America’s finances. We went from a deficit of $80 billion in 2010 to a surplus of over $100 billion in his final year. Why didn’t the mainstream media ever report that?

Because who cares, that’s why. You know what happens in April? Everyone pays their taxes. Does that mean the deficit is in great shape every April? Of course not. That just happens to be when a lot of the money comes in.

But it doesn’t matter. As I’ve mentioned before, Trump’s tweets are for for his fans, not for us. And his fans now think that in his very first month Trump has erased the deficit. The guy promised action, and by God, he’s delivered. It just goes to show that all this deficit stuff wasn’t really so hard to solve after all. It just needed a man of action to go in and straighten things out.

Not that the FAKE NEWS media will ever admit that, of course.

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Donald Trump Obliterates the Deficit!

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Republicans Don’t Care About the Deficit, Part 543

by Elida531785 Posted on January 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports today on the latest harangue from those hardline, deficit-hating, no-compromise, tea-party Republicans:

In a dramatic reversal, many members of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus said Thursday they are prepared later this month to support a budget measure that would explode the deficit and increase the public debt to more than $29.1 trillion by 2026, figures contained in the budget resolution itself.

….“I just came to understand all the different ideas about where we go next,” said Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus that typically opposes massive spending increases. Schweikert now says he will probably vote for the budget resolution.

Here’s the text of the budget resolution:

As always, Republicans only care about deficits when a Democrat is president. This time around they didn’t waste even two days before they made that crystal clear. I wonder how many times they can pull this bait-and-switch before the public and the press stops taking them seriously on their alleged horror of the spiraling national debt?

Republicans want to cut spending on the poor and cut taxes on the rich. That’s it. Deficits haven’t bothered them since the Reagan era. But I have to admit that this latest U-turn is pretty brazen even for them. It was only a few short months ago that they were swearing on a stack of Bibles that debt was eating our nation alive and they would never, ever vote for a budget that increased the deficit.

But it turns out there was an asterisk. If the deficit is produced by cutting Obamacare taxes on the rich and repealing Obamacare benefits for the poor, then it’s OK.

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Republicans Don’t Care About the Deficit, Part 543

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Rand Paul’s Plan to Give the Economy a "Steriod Injection" Could Have Scary Side Effects

by AlvinMacDonnell Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) unveiled his plan to give the economy a “steroid injection” by rewriting the country’s tax code down to a simple, straightforward flat tax of 14.5 percent on personal income and a 14.5 percent “business activity tax.” By Paul’s reckoning, this would save taxpayers billions and supercharge the economy almost immediately upon implementation. But at least one nonprofit group that advocates tax reform is saying that, just like a real steroid injection, Paul’s scheme to quickly bulk up the economy may have long-term and devastating effects for its health.

Setting aside all other questions about the credibility of a flat tax, nonprofit think tank Citizens for Tax Justice released its analysis of Paul’s proposal, and it’s ugly.

When the dust clears, this would leave the federal government with $1.2 trillion less in tax revenue in fiscal year 2016 if the plan were implemented immediately—a reduction of about one-third in total federal revenues. Over a decade, the plan would cost a stunning $15 trillion.

Ultimately, the fiscal realities of the tax plan might not matter. The flat tax has never caught fire as a presidential election issue. In 2012, Herman Cain had his “9-9-9” plan and Rick Perry suggested a 20 percent flat tax. Most famously, in 1996 there was Steve Forbes, who briefly looked like he could turn his magazine-famous name into a politically relevant one—but didn’t.

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Rand Paul’s Plan to Give the Economy a "Steriod Injection" Could Have Scary Side Effects

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