Say Anything Blog

Because letting people keep more of their money is the same as spending that money in the eyes of the average liberal journalist.  Because it’s not really our money to begin with, right?

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama promises $4,000 credits to help pay college tuition. Hillary Rodham Clinton backs $25 billion for home heating subsidies. And John McCain wants to not only extend President Bush’s tax cuts, but eliminate the alternative minimum tax at a cost of about $2 trillion over 10 years.

Then there’s reality.

These campaign pledges — and dozens more in the manifestos of the leading presidential candidates — face a collision with the real world come January.

That’s when the new president will start putting together a real budget and economic plan, one drafted against the backdrop of record federal deficits exceeding $400 billion. Even more challenging is the growth of the Medicare and Social Security retirement programs, which budget experts say could require wrenching benefit cuts, politically difficult tax hikes or both to handle the retirement of the baby boom generation.

In that environment, promises to effectively rebate the first $500 of Social Security payroll taxes (Obama), provide $1,000 tax credits for retirement savings (Clinton) or cut the corporate income tax by 10 percentage points (McCain) may turn out to be campaign fantasies.

“They’re operating in Never Never Land.... None of them are honestly addressing the real challenges that they’re going to be facing if they’re elected,” said Leon Panetta, former budget director and chief of staff for President Clinton. “We’re facing a deficit bubble that is getting increasingly worse and at some point is going to explode on us.”

It is enormously unfair to compare tax cuts to spending increases.  For one, tax cuts aren’t like spending because they can (though not always) result in higher tax revenues.  After Bush cut taxes in 2001 the federal deficit actually dropped as increase federal tax receipts outpaced spending.  In fact, if our political leaders could have at least just stopped the increase in federal spending the deficit would have reversed and we’d be on our way toward decent reductions in the national debt.

But that didn’t happen, so the debt continues to grow.

Kudos to the media for at least pointing out that Hillary and Obama’s massive new spending proposals aren’t realistic at all, but saying those increases in spending are the same as tax cuts is just plain dishonest.