Re: The Washington Post (was: GOP leader concedes tax cuts may not pay for themselves as 2019 deficit grows - The Washington Post)

Thanks, David.  With "gated" or semi-gated items, I should provide a text
anyone can see.  I've added one below my signature here.

But I didn't intend to bother classics-l with this sort of report, and on
my computer, can't find a trace of having addressed it to you.  Did
you *receive
*it on the classics-l list?  I seem to have erred in some new way.  I
apologize to all, but wonder how I achieved this.
Very best wishes,

Dan

GOP leader concedes tax cuts may not pay for themselves as 2019 deficit
grows

U.S. House Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Representative Kevin
Brady (R-TX) sits for an onstage interview about the U.S. budget at the
Peterson Foundation’s annual Fiscal Summit in Washington on June 11, 2019.
(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters).
By Heather Long
June 11 at 4:57 PM
Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), a lead architect of the GOP tax bill, suggested
Tuesday the tax cuts may not fully pay for themselves, contradicting a
promise Republicans made repeatedly while pushing the law in late 2017.
Pressed about what portion of the tax cuts were fully paid for, Brady said
it was “hard to know."
“We will know in year 8, 9 or 10 what revenues it brought in to the
government over time. So it’s way too early to tell,” said Brady at the
Peterson Foundation’s annual Fiscal Summit in Washington D.C.
The federal government’s deficit typically shrinks during strong economic
times, but the deficit is up nearly 40 percent so far this fiscal year,
according to the latest Congressional Budget Office report released Friday.
[Trump vowed to eliminate the debt in 8 years. He’s on track to leave it at
least 50 percent higher.]
Spending is up $255 billion for the first eight months of the fiscal year,
the CBO said, while revenues are up only $49 billion. Corporate tax
receipts are down after Republicans enacted the largest reduction in
business taxes in U.S. history. Individual income taxes are basically flat
this year (they are growing less than the rate of inflation). Most of the
revenue increase is coming from President Trump’s tariffs and more payroll
taxes, which were not cut in the tax bill.
“Revenue fell, it didn’t rise, after the tax cuts,” said Marc Goldwein,
senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Brady’s comments are a marked departure from the claim many Republicans
made during the tax bill debate that the tax cuts would be fully paid for
by additional economic growth that would, in turn, spur additional tax
revenues for government coffers.
Numerous independent analyses concluded that the tax bill would add
substantially to the U.S. debt, which currently stands at $22 trillion. CBO
estimated the total cost of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is $1.9 trillion —
after taking into account additional growth and interest payments.
[Have tax cuts ever paid for themselves?]
“Anybody who tells you the fact the tax cuts are going to pay for
themselves. It’s not true. It’s nonsense. You can use the full words of
B.S.,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif). in an appearance at the
Fiscal Summit shortly after Brady.
But Brady said it was important to consider whether the tax cuts were a
good investment. He argued there are “very encouraging” signs that the
economy is performing better after the tax cuts with strong job growth,
improved wage growth and higher business investment.
“I don’t think anything could have been worse for the deficit than to stick
with the old economy and stick with the tax code that was so outdated,”
said Brady, who pointed to higher payroll tax collection as a sign more
people are working now.
The economy expanded at a rate of 2.9 percent last year, up from 2.2 in
2017 and 1.6 in 2016, according to the Commerce Department. The White House
predicts 3 percent growth for years to come, but nearly all independent
economists expect growth to be closer to 2 percent for much of the next
decade.
Republicans say the federal government has a spending problem and needs to
scale back while many Democrats want to see higher taxes, especially on
wealthier households.
The GOP-controlled Senate, the Democrat-controlled House and the White
House are currently in the midst of tough negotiations on the 2020 budget
plan that is supposed to take effect on Oct. 1. If no agreement is reached,
automatic caps will take effect that reduce both domestic and military
spending by a total of $125 billion, a scenario few want in the run up to
an election year.
House Budget Chair John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) said the negotiations are “not
going very well” so far.
“I don’t think there would be any problem at all getting Senate and House
agreement on funding levels,” said Yarmuth, but he called the White House
“unpredictable.”
The expectation is that Congress and the White House will eventually agree
to lift spending even higher than it is now for both military and domestic
programs. Yarmuth’s proposal would raise spending by about the same amount
as the GOP tax cuts for the next decade, according to the Committee for a
Responsible Federal Budget.
“There is no center of gravity to reduce spending in this town,” said Mick
Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff at the Fiscal Summit.
Mulvaney, a former GOP congressman who pushed back aggressively against
President Obama for smaller budgets, called Trump’s budgets the “most
fiscally responsible budgets that have ever been drafted.”
But experts disagreed, pointing out that the president’s budgets relied on
very optimistic growth assumptions and hefty cuts to domestic programs that
were a non-starter in Congress. The budget deficit is up more than 80
percent so far this fiscal year over the same period in 2016 before Trump
took office.









Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 12, 2019, at 3:02 AM, David Schaps <[email protected]> wrote:

Dan, please warn us before sending us links to the Washington Post. They
allow non-subscribers only a small number of articles per month, and
clicking on your url uses one up. The words "washingtonpost.com" do indeed
appear in the behemoth of a url that Google uses to make sure that it knows
about every link you send and every person who clicks on it, but of course
I don't read every "word" of that.

On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 4:36 AM DANIEL P. Tompkins <[email protected]>
wrote:

> This is Rep. Kevin Brady.  I assume some will look up what he and other
> Republican leaders were telling the nation in December 2017.
>
> Don’t ignore comments on deficit. In ‘09, GOP fought infrastructure
> spending, claiming deficit was such an awful thing. When 2017 offered a
> chance to violate that norm to enrich themselves, sky was the limit.
>
> Guess who gets hurt.
>
> Dan
>
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/06/11/gop-leader-concedes-tax-cuts-may-not-pay-themselves-deficit-grows/
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone



-- 
Prof. Em. David M. Schaps
Department of Classical Studies
Bar-Ilan University
5290002 Ramat-Gan, Israel
-972-53-312-5666