Super Committee Republicans’ ‘Deficit Reduction’ Plan Includes $800 Billion In Tax Cuts

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

The congressional fiscal super committee that is tasked with crafting a deficit reduction package of at least $1.5 trillion met today with the architects of the Bowles-Simpson and Rivlin-Domenici deficit reduction plans. Both Democrats and Republicans have recently released their initial offers to the super committee, which seems no nearer to cutting a final deal than it did when it was first formed.

As Igor Volsky noted earlier this week, the plan that the Democratic members of the super committee released is well to the right of bipartisan plans like Bowles-Simpson or the plan crafted by the Senate’s Gang of Six (both of which included unnecessary cuts to vital programs). In fact, the Democrats’ plan has about six dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in new revenue (while Bowles-Simpson had a two to one ratio).

The Republicans, meanwhile, released a “deficit reduction” plan that, depending on the revenue baseline assumed by both Bowles-Simpson and the Gang of Six, would cut taxes to the tune of more than $800 billion over 10 years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The new Republican plan provides for slightly more than $3 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years, relative to a current-policy baseline that assumes extension of all the 2001-2003 tax cuts. (See Table 1.) Of that amount, only about 1 percent of the deficit reduction ($40 billion) stems from revenue increases. And, compared to the “plausible baseline” that the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission and the Senate’s Gang of Six used, which assumes expiration of the upper-income tax cuts, the latest Republican plan actually provides for tax cuts of more than $800 billion over ten years.

Overall, “the Republican plan would produce $1 trillion less deficit reduction than the Democratic offer, relative to any baseline.” The Republicans, in their zeal to indiscriminately reduce taxes regardless of the country’s ability to afford it, evidently believe that no deficit reduction plan is complete without blowing a new hole in the federal budget.

Schakowsky: Debt Commission Success ‘Unlikely’ Because Conservatives Are ‘Closing The Door’ On Taxes

By Pat Garofalo

Back in February, President Obama created a debt commission by executive order, which is tasked with crafting a proposal to reduce long-term deficits through a combination of revenue increases and spending cuts. Theoretically, the package crafted by the commission will then be voted on by Congress, but in order for it to ever see a vote, 14 of the 18 commission members need to approve it.

One of the concerns about the commission is that it will inequitably favor spending cuts (particularly to entitlements like Social Security) and eschew common sense tax increases. This is particularly worrisome because the commission includes some members — like Reps. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) — who fearmonger about any kind of tax increase.

Today, at the America’s Future Now conference, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — who is also a commission member — said that success for the commission is “unlikely” because conservatives members are refusing to consider tax increases. In an interview with ThinkProgress, she said that she’s worried conservatives are giving “some lip service” to increasing revenue, but “are closing that door and taking it off the table” when it comes to specifics:

[Conservatives] give some lip service to ‘everything should be on the table,’ then, when it actually comes to what kind of revenue can we raise, are closing that door and taking it off the table, and saying that they’re not really willing to consider those things. The problem, in their view, is all about spending, and of course, that’s not the case. Actually, discretionary spending has been pretty darn flat over the years. We’ve seen a growth of wealth among the wealthy already and flat income for ordinary people…It may mean that the commission really deadlocks.

Watch it:

Currently, taxes are the lowest that they’ve been in 50 years, and the U.S. has the fifth lowest taxes as a share of GDP among economically developed nations. Even if we tried to balance the budget entirely on tax increases (which no one is suggesting), the United States would still be in the bottom ten. Balancing the budget entirely on the back of spending cuts, meanwhile, would require draconian reductions that will have the greatest negative impact on the most vulnerable populations.

For her part, Schakowsky said that its unconscionable that Congress is considering spending billions of dollars to cut the estate tax, at the same time that the debt commission is putting Social Security cuts on the table. She also pushed back against the notion that deficit reduction should take precedence over job creation in the short-term. “Leaving our children debt free — does that mean leaving them sick, uneducated, and unemployed?” she asked.