Washington Post: Who Is Going To Pay For All This New Spending Barack And Hillary Are Promising?
The Post notes that if the Democrats get their way this country is going to be bankrupt:
THE DEMOCRATIC presidential candidates have some big plans—with big price tags attached. By our calculations, using figures supplied by the campaigns, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) has proposed new spending and tax breaks that would amount to almost $265 billion a year when fully implemented, while the initiatives proposed by Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) total nearly $333 billion. Those initiatives, which would be phased in over time and which the candidates say they have identified ways of funding, don’t include billions of dollars more in one-time spending.
In addition, both candidates would extend the Bush tax cuts for those making less than $250,000 a year, at an annual cost of another $140 billion in 2012, and renew the research tax credit ($9 billion). And both say they would take steps to prevent the alternative minimum tax from sweeping in additional taxpayers, adding $50 billion or so to the annual price tag. So the deficit—even before any new spending—would be that much deeper than it would have been if the tax cuts were permitted to expire.
The bit about extending the Bush tax cuts “costing” the country money is a bit of a stretch given that, according to the CBO, federal tax revenues have grown 35% from 2003 to 2006. Bush signed into law significant changes in the federal tax code in 2001 and 2003, meaning that those revenues came after his tax cuts. While one cannot specifically say that the Bush tax cuts increased revenues it’s certainly more than a little facetious to say that they cost the government money.
But the larger point stands true: How in the world are we going to pay for what these Democrats are promising? One answer is that they’re going to tax the hell out of us.
The other answer is that they’re just making promises they have no intention of following through on for the sake of getting elected.
Neither answer is very pretty.
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