Democrats often try to hide policies when they know they won’t be popular among the majority of Americans. Often Dems will bury things such as tax hikes where no one will find them deep within unrelated bills, but Senate Budget Committee chairwoman Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) wrote a memo that leaked out proscribing massive new tax increases to come in the four-year late Senate budget.
Murray circulated a memo to fellow Democrats in January that proposes spending reductions, but only those that are matched dollar-for-dollar with tax increases, i.e. no cut whatsoever. Murray’s memo indicates that she believes that a cut of approximately $2.4 trillion over the next decade is warranted as long as there is another tax increase, following the increase already instituted in January, of another $1.2 trillion. “These bipartisan frameworks include significant new revenue and have far more balance between spending cuts and revenue increases than the deficit reduction measures we’ve enacted to date,” Murray’s memo states. “For instance, the President’s Fiscal Commission and the Senate’s Gang of Six each proposed roughly $4.8 trillion in deficit reduction over the 2012-2021 period, with over $2 trillion coming in the form of new revenue. Excluding the interest savings of roughly $800 billion, the two bipartisan efforts proposed a roughly 1:1 ratio of spending and revenue savings.”
“Further, measured over the same ten-year window used to estimate the effects of the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA) legislation (2013-2022), the two bipartisan efforts each provide for revenue of between $2.4 trillion and $2.5 trillion, or roughly four times the amount of new revenue to be generated by the year-end deal,” Murray continued.
The Budget Control Act reduced the growth of the debt by $4.8 trillion and Murray counts the $2.4 trillion of future deficit reduction from those numbers. Murray’s numbers suggest a reduction to achieve the total $4.8 through a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes, meaning an equal amount of tax increases and spending cuts.
What will the Democrats, such as Murray do when they run out of rich people to tax? You guessed it: the target will be placed directly on the middle-class.
Meanwhile the House Budget Committee lead by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) released one more budget hoping to find some room for negotiations with Democrats.
—————————————————————
Listen to Mr. Kaplan on NTN Radio Fridays at 3pm EST
Subscribe to Mr. Kaplan’s articles at Examiner.com
Email Mr. Kaplan at ken@conservativelyspeaking.us
Follow Mr. Kaplan’s tweets at ConsSpeaking