For the first time since 2009, Congress is on its way to producing a broad outline of long-term tax and spending policy, a.k.a. a joint budget resolution. The Republicans who won control of Congress in the 2014 election settled on
For the first time since 2009, Congress is on its way to producing a broad outline of long-term tax and spending policy, a.k.a. a joint budget resolution. The Republicans who won control of Congress in the 2014 election settled on a joint document in a House-Senate conference committee on Wednesday, and the lower chamber approved it Thursday, with the upper chamber to follow soon. GOP leaders are hailing this as proof that theirs is the party of regular order and governance.
We can’t argue with this procedural success; the substance of their plan, however, is less admirable. The Republican plan would produce a balanced budget by 2025. And it would provide a needed shoring-up of defense spending. It can only achieve these objectives, however, based on a massive reduction to the rest of the federal budget, including not only programs such as infrastructure, education and research, but also Medicaid and food stamps for the poor.
This out-of-whack shift of public resources is necessitated by the GOP’s refusal even to consider raising more tax revenue — not even by curbing or eliminating inefficient tax loopholes. In fact, the revenue assumptions in the budget resolution don’t account for the $400 billion in revenue reductions over 10 years, including the elimination of the estate tax, that the House has already approved on a separate legislative track. The GOP plan calls for the repeal of health-care reform via the filibuster-proof legislative maneuver of “reconciliation” in the Senate, as well as the use of $96 billion in notional spending on overseas military operations as a gimmick to increase Pentagon spending above the limits set in the prevailing sequestration agreement, without offsetting cuts or tax hikes.
We could go on and on, but there’s little point, since “budgets are ideological documents,” not reliable guides to actual final legislation, as House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., conceded — and the ideology embodied in the GOP blueprint would lay waste to so much of the federal government that even many Republicans might recoil from enacting it during the appropriations process this year. One GOP budget hawk, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., even joined with Democrat Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who enjoys support from the Obama administration, in an ultimately futile effort to prevent Republicans from tapping the overseas military funds to pay for what would otherwise be an uncontroversial Veterans Affairs and military construction spending bill. The actual amount of money at stake, $532 million, was not that large. The principle — truth in budgeting — was.
The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats can agree on a practical, paid-for plan for sequester relief once the current two-year deal expires on September 30. Republicans want more defense spending, paid for with entitlement or other spending cuts; the Obama administration and congressional Democrats demand that military spending increases be matched on the domestic side, and that taxes be raised to help pay for it all.
The ultimate deal, if any, would require concessions all around, which, in turn, would call for a level of realism that was nowhere evident in the budget documents Republicans have produced so far.
— Washington Post
