Bruce, how are you including your photos. I get nothing but broken
photo symbols in a rectangle from your emails.
On 12/19/2010 12:19 PM, Bruce Majors wrote:
*Libertarian Plan Balances the Federal Budget by 2020 Without Raising
Taxes*
*Tuesday, November 30, 2010*
*By Matt Cover <http://cnsnews.com/source/73645> *
*/Description: budget, fiscal 2011 budget, Obama budget book/*
<http://cnsnews.com/image/60776>
/A copy of President Barack Obama's Fiscal 2011 budget plan, which was
delivered to the Senate Budget Committee on Monday, Feb. 1, 2010. (AP
Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)/
*(CNSNews.com)*-**A budget-balancing proposal from the libertarian
CATO Institute achieves fiscal equilibrium in only ten years. The plan
drastically cuts federal spending, reforms entitlements and makes
permanent the Bush-era tax rates.
Written by Director of Tax Policy Studies Chris Edwards, *the plan*
<http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/sites/default/files/balanced_budget_plan.pdf>
spares no area of federal spending in its quest to control the federal
budget.
“Federal spending is soaring, and government debt is piling up at more
than a trillion dollars a year. Official projections show rivers of
red ink for years to come unless policymakers enact major budget
reforms. Unless spending is cut, the United States is headed down the
road to economic ruin,” the plan says.
The plan proposes to cut spending by $1 trillion annually by 2020,
which would reduce spending to its late-1990s level of 18 percent of
GDP. The plan also extends the Bush-era tax rates indefinitely, which
Edwards estimates will bring revenues back to their traditional
average of 18 percent of GDP, once the recession ends.
The plan focuses on spending cuts, arguing that the federal government
has moved into areas it has no business being in and ought to be
removed from.
“In recent decades, the federal government has expanded into hundreds
of areas that should be left to state and local governments,
businesses, charities, and individuals. That expansion is sucking the
life out of the private economy and creating a top-down bureaucratic
society that is alien to American traditions. Cutting federal spending
would enhance civil liberties by dispersing power from Washington.”
The plan argues that spending cuts should not be seen as a necessary
evil just in a time of financial crisis: “Policymakers shouldn’t think
of spending cuts as a necessary evil needed to reduce debt. Rather,
the government’s fiscal mess is an opportunity to make reforms that
would spur growth and expand individual freedom.”
Edwards told CNSNews.com that he wrote his plan to demonstrate to
lawmakers that the budget could be balanced without raising taxes,
something that many Democrats say is impossible.
“A lot of the Washington experts think we need large tax hikes to
solve our budget problem, and I wanted to show in this plan how you
can cut the debt and even balance the budget over ten years without
increasing taxes,” he said.
“It’s going to be tough work,” Edwards admitted, adding that “a lot of
subsidy programs that people have used for years I think should be
eliminated.”
Edwards said liberal critiques of his proposals – that such large
spending cuts would actually hurt the economy – are based on a flawed
economic theory. Reducing spending to late-1990s levels would not doom
the economy: “That Keynesian idea that somehow spending cuts are bad
for the economy I think is completely, exactly wrong,” he said.
Edwards also noted that his proposed level of federal spending is not
exactly radical, given that 18 percent of GDP is exactly the level
Democrats and Republicans agreed on in the late 1990s.
“That was a bipartisan thing between [former President] Clinton and
the Republicans,” he said. “Liberals like to forget when they’re
arguing for higher tax rates on rich people right now, they forget
that the bipartisan 1986 tax reform act cut the top income tax rate to
just 28 percent, and today it’s already 35 and liberals want it up to
40 next year.
Liberals seem to forget that in the Clinton era, “Democrats were more
moderate and were willing to accept lower tax rates and they were for
more restraint in the budget.”
A key proponent of Edwards’ plan addresses defense spending, an area
where conservatives are generally criticized when discussing budget
cuts. Edwards’ plan incorporates not just the usual reforms on how the
Pentagon buys weapons and equipment, but also calls for a complete
re-evaluation of the size of the U.S. military and the missions it
undertakes.
“Over the last decade, the size of our ground forces and Marine Corps
has grown substantially, and yet 9/11 was about terrorism and the
response to terrorism, so there’s no clear reason why the overall size
of our military structure has grown,” he said.
Edwards said that when it comes to the politics of spending cuts,
there is no reason for Republicans to be “chicken” in telling the
public exactly what they plan to cut. Edwards noted that former
President Ronald Reagan and the Republican Congresses of the 1990’s
laid out specific spending cuts and did not suffer politically for them.
“I do not understand why even after the election, Republican leaders
are being too chicken to tell us exactly where they would cut
spending. We just had a landslide election. It’s clear the American
public wants cuts,” he argued.
“I do not buy that spending cuts are bad for political popularity.”
__._,_.___
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