http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/opinion/paul-krugman-trillion-dollar-fraudsters.html
[links in on-line article]
Trillion Dollar Fraudsters
MARCH 20, 2015
By now it’s a Republican Party tradition: Every year the party produces
a budget that allegedly slashes deficits, but which turns out to contain
a trillion-dollar “magic asterisk” — a line that promises huge spending
cuts and/or revenue increases, but without explaining where the money is
supposed to come from.
But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break
new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic
asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an
understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the
federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed,
and that’s just in the first decade.
You might be tempted to shrug this off, since these budgets will not, in
fact, become law. Or you might say that this is what all politicians do.
But it isn’t. The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new
in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about
what has happened to half of our political spectrum.
So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal
spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would
be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over
and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s
health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan
would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance.
But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to
mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of
Medicare or Social Security. What form would these further cuts take? We
get no hint.
Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act,
including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1
trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts;
somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost
Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.
And there’s more: The budgets also claim large reductions in spending on
other programs. How would these be achieved? You know the answer.
It’s very important to realize that this isn’t normal political
behavior. The George W. Bush administration was no slouch when it came
to deceptive presentation of tax plans, but it was never this blatant.
And the Obama administration has been remarkably scrupulous in its
fiscal pronouncements.
O.K., I can already hear the snickering, but it’s the simple truth.
Remember all the ridicule heaped on the spending projections in the
Affordable Care Act? Actual spending is coming in well below
expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its
forecast for the next decade down by 20 percent. Remember the jeering
when President Obama declared that he would cut the deficit in half by
the end of his first term? Well, a sluggish economy delayed things, but
only by a year. The deficit in calendar 2013 was less than half its 2009
level, and it has continued to fall.
So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor
bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should
ask is why.
One answer you sometimes hear is that what Republicans really believe is
that tax cuts for the rich would generate a huge boom and a surge in
revenue, but they’re afraid that the public won’t find such claims
credible. So magic asterisks are really stand-ins for their belief in
the magic of supply-side economics, a belief that remains intact even
though proponents in that doctrine have been wrong about everything for
decades.
But I’m partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these
budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified
spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge
transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see
severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the
simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they
are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich
richer and ordinary families poorer.
But this is, of course, not a policy direction the public would support
if it were clearly explained. So the budgets must be sold as courageous
efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt — which means that they
must include trillions in imaginary, unexplained savings.
Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of
budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were
never sincere? Yes, it does.
Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years
of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous,
destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.
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