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National Debt: No wonder President Obama has so heartily endorsed the "Gang of Six" deficit plan. Just like everything Obama has offered so far, it's short on details and long on tax hikes.
Soon after the "Gang of Six" — a bipartisan group of senators that has been trying for months to put together a deficit reduction plan — issued its new proposal, President Obama praised it as "a very significant step" that represents "the potential for bipartisan consensus."
What it really represents is Washington at its worst.
The "plan" Obama was praising isn't a plan at all, but a few pages of bullet points with vague concepts, promises of future cuts, and confusing, and at times contradictory, numbers.
And what details it does contain show that the gang has employed some of the most egregious budget tricks available to make the spending cuts look bigger and tax hikes smaller than they actually are.
The best example of this is the plan's tax proposal, which alternately boasts that it cuts taxes by $1.5 trillion and raises them by $1 trillion, but which more likely will result in taxes going up by more than $3 trillion.
According to the outline, the $1.5 trillion in "tax relief" is how the Congressional Budget Office would score the plan.
But what the gang conveniently leaves out is that the CBO's forecast has $4.6 trillion in tax hikes already baked into it. That's because the CBO baseline assumes all the Bush tax cuts get repealed, that every other temporary tax cut is left to expire, and that the alternative minimum tax continues to entrap millions more middle-class families each year.
Once you take that into account, the $1.5 trillion in "tax relief" turns instead into a $3.1 trillion tax increase over the next decade. (It's anyone's guess where the gang got its $1 trillion tax hike figure.)
The plan also boasts an "immediate" down payment of $500 billion in deficit reduction.
But there's nothing immediate about it at all.
These savings come mainly from a three-year cap on discretionary spending — never mind that such spending caps haven't ever worked in the past — as well as a change in the official inflation index that would cut annual Social Security benefit increases and impose a hidden tax on families by lowering the annual inflation adjustment to tax brackets.
The long-term plan doesn't appear any better.
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Posted By: Capitalist_Dad(305) on 7/21/2011 | 10:05 AM ET
The Gang of Six would rather bury the country under ruinous debt and taxes than relinquish power! *** "The Tool" Durban is in the gang, and I know from attempting to correspond with this stooge that the only thoughts in his head were put there by his Democrat masters. Go House! Shut government down so real Americans can see if we miss its thieving, lying, and liberty-killing!
Posted By: bobbygordon(6160) on 7/21/2011 | 9:23 AM ET
Picture millions... MILLIONS of unemployed ex bureaucrats... Millions of unemployed Dilberts scratching around trying to find work in the real world. Imagine the end of government as we know it and a 50% reduction in the federal budget. See clearly the end of regulatory agencies and the beginning of advisory boards at a SMALL fraction of cost and less than half of the employees of today. The PERMANENT END of leviathan federal government... Am I threatening you with a good time?
Posted By: dorsaighost(120) on 7/21/2011 | 7:36 AM ET
the only GOP lawmakers that have jumped onboard are the 3 members of the Gang of 6 ... not one member of the House is onboard ... won't even come up for a vote in the House ...
Posted By: Trader Mike(165) on 7/21/2011 | 6:31 AM ET
The very first bullet point on this plan uses Obama's 2011 budget request as the baseline for spending, the very same budget that was defeated in the Senate 97-0. One thing is a given: if Obama is for it, then it is bad.
Posted By: GrannyRob(3550) on 7/21/2011 | 2:54 AM ET
Democrats and RINOs getting together always spells doom and gloom and tax hikes!
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