Force The Issue- Talking About Budgets

Tomorrow will mark the ONE YEAR point since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. A year later, the public isn't crazy about the bill. On the whole, they oppose it's repeal, but they greatly dislike the "Individual Mandate." With time, approval will improve for the bill. In a few short years, people will start to see increased coverage, along with the government subsidies to pay for it. They will see something else. Twenty years from now, this will have saved us hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. It was the most important deficit busting bill so far passed in this administration, as CBO has said.

How much does this currently matter in the debate about budgets? Zero. Guys like Haley Barbour, wasting state money on trips to set up his Presidential campaign, are lecturing us about the need for austerity. Governors like Scott Walker, Tom Corbett, and Rick Scott are destroying public education, public health, and worker compensation for the purpose of "shared sacrifice," while slashing corporate and top end taxes record amounts, and worse yet, giving jobs to their cronies. John Boehner is cutting $61 billion from federal spending that benefits the public, while not touching the wealthy and the Pentagon. All the while, they tell us we already have the most "progressive tax code" in the world, and it's time to go back the other way. Boehner even went so far as to say we "don't have a revenue problem." Really?

Don't let reality get in the way for ya' guys. The goons on Capitol Hill write to the President and "beg him to not make them raise the national deficit," all the while pretending that ending the Bush Tax Cuts, the largest driver of our debt the last decade, isn't an option. Really guys?

It seems as though everybody in Washington has forgotten that the Bush tax cuts are by far the biggest reason that the deficit has exploded. During the Clinton years, federal taxes were a bit less than 20% of GDP. During the Bush years, they dropped to a bit under 18% of GDP. Meanwhile, with the exception of Bush's final year in office (which featured TARP plus a decline in GDP), spending was virtually unchanged as a percentage of GDP. In other words, the increase in debt under Bush is almost entirely attributable to his tax policy, with most of the balance coming from TARP and the Great Recession.

It's only logical, therefore, that any serious policy to restore fiscal health would return to Clinton-era tax rates by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. For the longer-term, we'd still have to deal with the impact of rising health care costs on Medicare and Medicaid, but at least in the medium-term, we'd have eliminated most of the structural deficit.

For extra credit, we could also immediately adopt Jan Schakowsky's millionaire's tax proposal. Her plan would raise $89 billion for 2011 if adopted immediately, reducing the deficit by 50% more than the GOP plan while avoiding crucial cuts to programs like childhood vaccinations.

Yeah, but that's not even in the "adult conversation." Instead we're cutting nutrition for pregnant women, the same pregnant women the right-wing wants to force into motherhood. We keep hearing we're broke, but the fact is we're not. We're not "overtaxed" either. Taxed Enough Already? Some of us might be. The billionaires are not.

There are certain realities that those of us on "the left" do need to face, such as the need for entitlement REFORM (not destruction). The right needs to face a lot too. The rich pay less taxes than the rest of us, as a percentage of their income, and that's simply not right. The Bush Tax Cuts need to go away. The spending cuts that Defense Secretary Robert Gates SUGGESTED be cut from HIS budget, have to be axed now. Health Care Reform is necessary to solving our long term deficit, even if it needs to be changed substantially. Ronald Reagan's "slash taxes to the top, see it trickle down" theory just doesn't work, even if you do want to elevate him to saint hood. And finally, yes, behavior matters. If you want us to take your "austerity" seriously, you can't take expensive trips on the public dime, hire mistresses and unqualified family members of your campaign manager, or cut taxes for corporations while gutting out our public services. We understand that less is less. No Governor Christie, $50,000 a year workers ARE NOT the reason your state has an exploding budget, no matter how many times you say it. Do we have stuff to accept? Yeah, we liberals do, in fact we may have to accept at some point the government doing less for people, if these other things are all done. No though, shared sacrifice doesn't mean "screw the poor."