Tag Archives: spending

Debt, Spending, and Taxes Revisited

Posted on by
Reply

PowerLine has a couple of graphs that tell the story in President Obama’s own words.  Of course, he wants to raise corporate taxes in part to cover this shortfall, even though raising taxes, beyond a level long since surpassed, reduces tax revenue collected as businesses (and individuals, in response to parallel attempts to raise taxes on them) do what comes naturally for all of us: look for ways to hang onto what’s ours, rather than give it up to a ravenous government.

The graphs are clear in their own right; I’ll say no more here.

Remember this in November.

A Look at our National Debt

Posted on by
Reply

The Congressional Budget Office pipes up.  Here’re some highlights from its January 31 annual Budget and Economic Outlook.

The current-law baseline which the CBO uses is a set of budget projections based on existing law as enacted, including sunsets and expirations.  These assumptions thus accept, for instance, that all temporary tax provisions, including those originally enacted as part of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003—the Bush tax cuts—will expire as scheduled and that the alternative minimum tax (AMT) will not be indexed for inflation past 2011.  Further, under these baseline assumptions, about $1 trillion of spending cuts that mandated under the Budget Control Act of 2011 following the failure of Congress’ supercommittee will begin as scheduled in January 2013.

What flows from this baseline?  The budget deficit falls from the current year’s nearly $1.1 trillion, or 7.0 percent of GDP, to 1.5 percent of GDP in fiscal 2015—primarily due to an optimistic 25 percent increase in total federal revenues during that period.  The CBO cautions, though, that the deficit will resume its expansion post-2015 due to mandatory spending on programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and increasing interest payments on the still expanding federal debt.

The CBO also offered estimates based on an alternate scenario and its assumptions.  In its “alternative fiscal scenario,” the CBO assumes that the expiring Bush tax cuts are extended (excluding the current 2% payroll tax holiday); the AMT is indexed for inflation post-2011; Medicare physician payments are held constant at current levels (rather than falling nearly 30 percent in March 2012); and the spending cuts required under the Budget Control Act do occur.

Using these assumptions, the CBO concludes that annual budget deficits will remain elevated at about 5.4% of GDP over the next 10 years, and the ratio of publicly held debt to GDP will rise from its current elevated level of nearly 72% in fiscal 2012 to over 94% in fiscal 2022.

There are other aspects to this.  The CBO estimates that with the Bush tax cut expiry, economic growth—GDP growth—will be a meager 1.1% until recovery can begin in the out-years.  On the other hand, were these alternate assumptions enacted, GDP growth would be 0.3 to 2.9 per centage points greater than under current law.  Later in the decade, though, higher levels of government borrowing would crowd out private investment, drive up interest rates, and hold back economic growth.

Notice what’s not being assumed in the alternative scenario: real cuts in spending.  The assumptions don’t even include the effects of the fictional cuts of “reduced increases” in future spending.  What is it that drives that “higher level of government borrowing?”  It’s not not enough revenue for the government.  It’s too much spending by the government.

When, and only when, government spending is reduced to sane levels can we begin to pay down our burgeoning national debt.  Only by leaving our money in our hands and not having it taken away from us by ever-increasing taxes and by ever-increasing debt payments can our private investments increase, our job creation increase, our prosperity begin to recover.

h/t: Deloitte

Government Shortfall

Posted on by
Reply

Here is another example of the failures inherent in government intrusion into the market.  The Wall Street Journal describes a solar energy project that is about to founder at great cost to at least one of the investing private enterprises.

It seems that First Solar, Inc., a solar panel manufacturer, had sold a 230-megawatt plant to Exelon Corp, an electricity generating company, with the sale contingent on Department of Energy execution of a loan it had made to finance the deal.  No money has flowed from DoE, though, because the Department cannot proceed until “all applicable permitting issues are resolved,” and there is “an issue with a construction permit that First Solar obtained from Los Angeles County.”

The items underlying the “issue” are both unclear and not relevant in this context.  What matters is that the problem exists; therefor, DoE cannot proceed with its loan; so the project, starved of these funds in particular, is in jeopardy.  Since time is short for getting everything finalized, First Solar may end up having to buy the plant back from Exelon, and the project may die on the vine.

This is not a failure of the present administration, in particular, or of the preceding one, though.  It’s not a failure of any particular administration.  This sort of failure is inherent in any government involvement in private markets because of the necessarily different imperatives inherent in government efforts vs those of private enterprise.  In particular, this failure is driven by government’s necessary concern for the use of the citizens’ tax money, its equally necessary caution in committing that money, and its equally necessary concern for not intruding into other governments’ jurisdictions (here the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County).

Even in an ideal world where these concerns could be taken as effectively and efficiently satisfied by government, these three are enough to make labyrinthine any governmental efforts to commit the money.  Private enterprises in a free market, on the other hand, are free to handle these imperatives among themselves according to their own readings of the risks involved—including ignoring them altogether, using Alexander’s bronze tangle-separating implement on the knots, or not structuring the deal in this kind of way in the first place.

Progressives and the Law

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote about the Progressives’ attitude to the law last fall.  Here’s another demonstration of their view.

By now it’s well known that, in direct contravention of the law, the Democratic Party-controlled Senate has declined to produce a budget for over 1,000 days.  Now the Senate Majority Leader, harry Reid (D, UT) has openly stated that he will refuse to allow the Senate to produce anything related for FY2013.  Budget?  We ain’t got no budgets.  We don’t need no budgets!  I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ budgets!  What Reid actually said was just as fictitious.  Referring to last summer’s debt-limit deal, he claimed:

We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year — it’s done, we don’t need to do it[.]

And his other pet, Senator Charles Schumer (D, NY) chimed in:

We have a budget. … It is a total falsity to say we haven’t passed a budget.

Despite this Progressive disdain, though, a budget resolution in the Senate is both legally necessary and highly useful.  Such a resolution serves as a blueprint for spending, and it provides a broad outline for the Senate Appropriations Committee’s spending choices.

Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) pointed out that the Senate Democrats

fell far, far short of solving this country’s fiscal problems.

and those Democrats

confirm they’ve given up on budgeting. What a disgrace. Reid’s refusal to budget is a recipe for crisis.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) said, as well (his complete statement is here),

Budget Control Act spending caps [that debt-limit deal], crafted behind closed doors and rushed to passage at the 11th hour under threat of panic, do not even approach the definition of the budget process that the law requires. They are not in any way or any sense a Senate Democrat budget plan.

Stand by for another year of Progressive disdain.  Remember it in November.

Economic Growth: Tax Cuts or Taxing and Spending Increases?

Posted on by
Reply

President Obama made his position clear in his State of the Union address (as if it wasn’t clear from his performance these last three years, already).  He wants more spending, and he wants to “pay” for it by increasing taxes on the hated rich.  He couldn’t find the energy to spend more than a sentence or two on spending cuts in his SOTUS; although he did find plenty of “green” energy for spending and tax hikes.

Indeed, when it comes to actually reining in government’s use of our money, Obama has been the czar of chimeras and false flags.  As the House Budget Committee Chairman, Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) has put it:

We have learned already that the president who’s had three years to try and propose real solutions to fix our fiscal crisis is ducking it….  He formed commissions and super committees, so he sort of outsourced the leadership only to decry their results.

Indeed.  Obama’s committees and study groups (I don’t share Ryan’s disdain for Obama’s use of them, per se; when one is ignorant of a subject, asking experts for advice is entirely appropriate) actually did generate some ideas worth serious discussion and which could have served as points of departure for real reform.  But for Obama, they were merely cynical tools of distraction; he blew off their recommendations without so much as a fare-thee-well.  And he’s been clear about how seriously he takes his own ideas.  Obama yukked it up over his “shovel ready jobs” chant:

…shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.

Obama does have his apologists.  Third Way think tank’s Jim Kessler insists:

[W]hen you’re in the middle of a recession it’s very dangerous to stop priming the pump.  You know, you need to get escape velocity, get out of the atmospheric pull of recession, break loose and then let the economy go loose.

But what Kessler, et al., don’t understand is that that “atmospheric pull” actually is government interference in our economy.  We can’t “get escape velocity,” to mix metaphors, with the government’s enormous sea anchor dragging us back.

How has Obama’s Progressive policies of higher taxes and more spending been working out?

His first installment, nearly a trillion dollars’ worth, failed to reduce unemployment or deliver the shovel-ready jobs he promised.  Of course he’s demonstrated how seriously he took his “shovel-ready” claim, even as he was making it.  His profligate spending, while succeeding in exploding the Federal deficit and the Federal debt—which now our grandchildren will have trouble paying down—beyond anyone’s worst nightmare at the start of the Panic of 2008, have done nothing else but hold back a normal cyclic recovery that has been struggling since the official end of that recession in the spring of 2009—nearly two years ago—just as similar Keynesian foolishness did for the Depression.

For his second try, he wanted to spend even more, and now he wants to raise taxes on a narrow group of Americans of whom he disapproves.  Ryan suggests checking the numbers.  Doing so exposes the depth of Obama’s cynicism in continuing to push for higher taxes.

All these tax increases that the president is talking about, they only cover 8 percent of his proposed spending increases. The other 92 percent of the president’s spending increases are borrowed money.

Ryan is being polite.  Those 92% are actually fantasy money—that’s the level of seriousness with which Progressives take other people’s money.

Here’s an alternative: reform our tax structure, including reducing rates, closing loopholes, and ending subsidies and credits.  To paraphrase Ryan’s argument, with Progressive tax increases hitting small businesses disproportionately (and hitting all of us—individuals and businesses of any size—too hard, simply by existing), comprehensive tax reform is far better than arbitrarily and capriciously raising taxes.

And then cut government spending to below the tax revenue generated.

One step currently under consideration, with both Republican and Demoncrat support, is the continuation of the temporary payroll tax holiday.  But this is a chimera; it will produce no effect on our economy.  It will, though, continue defunding an already dysfunctional Social Security system.  With the Progressives already having agreed that a 2 percentage point cut in taxes is good (and with Obama originally calling for a 3 percentage point cut in payroll taxes for both individuals and businesses), Republicans are blowing an excellent opportunity to begin serious reform.  The better place to put these cuts is as permanent income tax cuts for individuals and businesses, and as a first step toward larger income tax cuts and tax reform, generally.

Arthur Laffer suggests a more specific tax reform in a column in The Wall Street Journal.  As Laffer points out, and as thinking Americans have understood for a long time,

Jobs and wealth are created by those who are taxed, not by those who do the taxing. Government, by its very nature, doesn’t create resources but redistributes resources.

Laffer goes on to suggest that a flat tax is the optimum reform.  Although he uses Newt Gingrich’s version (an optional 15% flat tax for individuals, with the option being to continue paying under the present system, and a 12.5% flat tax for business) as his example for discussion, Laffer’s point is generally valid.

Laffer argues

Fairness in taxation means that people and businesses in like circumstances have similar tax burdens.  A flat tax, whether on business or individuals, achieves fairness in spades.*  A person who makes 10 times as much as another person should pay 10 times more in taxes.  It is also patently obvious that it is unfair to tax some people’s income twice, three times or more after it has been earned, as is the case with the death tax.

The current administration’s notion of fairness—taxing high-income earners at high rates and not taxing other income earners at all—is totally unfair.

Progressives—led by Obama—argue that it’s the rates that have to be progressive in a fair tax system, not just the amounts actually paid.  But concern with rates paid rather than amounts paid fails to achieve equal treatment at the start—at the point of equal opportunity; “progressive” tax rates only look to create equal outcomes, after the differing levels of ability, work ethic, and so on have been applied by the people involved, folks who behaved voluntarily according to their own imperatives.  Progressive rates punish hard work and success while subsidizing lesser effort.  There’s no fairness in this.

Finally, as Laffer points out,

[A] flat tax proposal is not revenue-neutral, nor should it be.  If there’s one truism in fiscal policy, it’s this: Wasteful spending will always rise to the level of revenues.  Whether you’re in Greece, Washington, D.C., or California, overspending is a prosperity killer of the first order. [A] flat tax…would put a quick stop to overspending and return America to fiscal soundness.

 

*I fully anticipate that Laffer will be called racist for using this term, and I’ll be similarly accused for repeating it.  Understand, though: only a racist will actively look to create racism where none exists, so he can cry, “Racist!”