Say Anything Blog

Back in March I posted about Kent Conrad dishonestly claiming that his proposed budget doesn’t raise taxes.  Then yesterday the Grand Forks Herald had some rather milquetoast criticism of Conrad (which seems about all North Dakota’s media can muster for the state’s congressional delegation) in an op/ed calling on him to explain how his budget doesn’t raise taxes.

Conrad conveniently responds the next day in a column in the Herald (almost like this was all coordinated or something) by claiming again that his budget really doesn’t raise taxes, and that it will increase revenue by closing the tax gap.

Because letting the Bush tax cuts (heralded as the largest tax cut in the history of this country since JFK’s tax reforms) expire, which forces us all to pay more in taxes as a result, somehow isn’t a tax hike.  Because, apparently, repealing a Republican tax cut (or just letting it expire) doesn’t actually raise taxes.

What utter nonsense.  Conrad doesn’t even address Bush’s tax cuts in his column, and that’s telling.  He doesn’t address, because he can’t.  Letting the Bush tax cuts expire is, in fact, raising taxes.  There’s just no way to get around that.

But the other nonsense in Conrad’s column has to do with increasing government revenues by “closing the tax gap,” which is a buzz term for collecting unpaid taxes from people who were supposed to pay them but didn’t.  Yet the problem with collecting those taxes is that it costs the government money to do so. Conrad can talk about the hundreds of billions of potentially collectible tax dollars available, but how many of those are they actually going to get their hands on?  If the people don’t have the money they don’t have the money, and no amount of government squeezing is going to get it out of them.  And some of these people are going to be evasive, or will fight the government in court, meaning that the IRS will likely have to spend millions on bureaucrats, court fees and lawyers just to collect that money.

The amount of revenue we could get out of the “tax gap” is marginal, at best.

Let’s boil this issue down to basics: Kent Conrad wrote a budget that increases government spending massively (there is $954 billion in discretionary spending, $21 billion above the President’s request, and an increase of $389.6 billion in non-discretionary spending for Medicare alone, which is a 6.6% increase over 2006 spending), and then he tells us that this increased spending will lead us to a balanced budget.

My question is: How?  There’s only two ways to balance a budget.  You cut spending or you increase revenue.  Neither Conrad nor his Dems are talking about cutting spending, so what’s the only option they’re left with? Increasing revenue.  Conrad says we can increase revenue by “closing the tax gap,” but by his own admission there’s only about $345 billion in that gap.  That’s not even enough to cover the increase in spending on Medicare by itself, let alone all the other spending increases Conrad has written into his budget.  And as I’ve already pointed out, thinking we can collect all or even most of the money in the tax gap is a pipe dream.

So the only option Conrad is left with to increase revenues to pay for his increased spending is to increase taxes.  Which is exactly what axing the Bush tax cuts does.

Conrad can employ all the double-speak and outright lies he wants, but his budget is a tax-and-spend liberal’s budget.  Plain and simple.