{"id":4295,"date":"2010-11-17T06:36:49","date_gmt":"2010-11-17T11:36:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinbryant.com\/?p=4295"},"modified":"2010-11-17T06:36:49","modified_gmt":"2010-11-17T11:36:49","slug":"cato-balancing-the-budget-not-that-dificult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/cato-balancing-the-budget-not-that-dificult\/","title":{"rendered":"Cato: balancing the budget not that dificult"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Simple to Balance the Budget without Higher Taxes<\/a><\/h1>\n

Posted by\u00a0Daniel J. Mitchell<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

John Podesta of the Center for American Progress had a\u00a0column in Politico <\/a>yesterday asserting that \u201cclosing the budget gap entirely on the spending side would require draconian programmatic cuts.\u201d He went on to complain that there are some people who \u201crefuse to look at the revenue side of the ledger \u2013 while insisting that we dig the hole $830 billion deeper over the next decade by extending the Bush tax cuts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, Mr. Podesta is totally wrong. It\u2019s actually not that challenging to balance the budget. And it doesn\u2019t even require any spending cuts, though it would be a\u00a0very good idea to dramatically downsize the federal government<\/a>. Here\u2019s a chart showing this year\u2019s spending and revenue totals. It then shows the Congressional Budget Office\u2019s estimate of how much revenues will grow, assuming all the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent and assuming that the alternative minimum tax is adjusted for inflation. As you can see, balancing the budget is a simple matter of limiting the annual growth of federal spending.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So how is it that Mr. Podesta can spout sky-is-falling rhetoric about \u201cdraconian\u201d cuts when all that\u2019s needed is fiscal restraint? The answer is that politicians in Washington have concocted a self-serving budget process that automatically assumes that all previously-planned spending increases should occur. So if the politicians put us on a path to make government 8 percent bigger next year\u00a0and there is a proposal to instead limit spending growth to 3 percent, that 3 percent increase gets portrayed as a 5 percent cut. read on<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Simple to Balance the Budget without Higher Taxes Posted by\u00a0Daniel J. Mitchell John Podesta of the Center for American Progress had a\u00a0column in Politico yesterday asserting that \u201cclosing the budget gap entirely on the spending side would require draconian programmatic cuts.\u201d He went on to complain that there are some people who \u201crefuse to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4295","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2gEQ0-17h","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}