Tag Archives: Magical

The Senate Democrats have, after four long years,
finally released an actual budget document. It’s not worth the
wait. It proposes spending $3.7 trillion in 2014, a number it grows
to $5.7 trillion in 2023. ;It calls for almost a trillion
dollars in new taxes over the same period.
The one interesting thing about it is something that has
been completely overlooked in most news accounts: When it comes to
next year’s spending and taxes, it is virtually indistinguishable
from the GOP’s rival plan.
Four years! William Faulkner published ;The Sound and
the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and
Light in August in a four-year span. The Beatles released
Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s,
Magical Mystery Tour, the “White album,” and Abbey
Road (plus other music) over four years. Even after turning
65, Clint Eastwood has managed to direct as
many as five movies during any given four-year period.
The Senate Democrats’ budget, led in this effort by Sen. Patty
Murray (D-Wash.), is called “Foundation
for Growth: Restoring the Promise of American Opportunity.”
They should be ashamed of themselves if this took more than few
long nights to pull together. ;With the tin-eared
chutzpah native to majority members in the World’s Greatest
Deliberative Body, the document proclaims

The Fiscal Year 2014 Senate Budget builds on the work done over
the last two years to create jobs, invest in broad-based economic
growth, and tackle our deficit and debt responsibly.

Here’s a news flash for the Senate Democrats (and the rest of
Congress): If you’re proposing more of whatever it is you’ve been
up to over the past two years or since 2009, when you last
submitted a budget, thanks but no thanks.
Click on the link above to read through the turgid verbiage that
surrounds the document, which pretends to bring some semblance of
restraint and responsibility despite proposing nearly a trillion
dollars in new taxes over the coming decade and increasing annual
government outlays from this year’s estimated $3.6 trillion to $5.7
trillion in 2023 (for the summary tables that lay out actual
spending and revenues,
go here).
If these folks can seriously claim that for a document that
proposes to increase annual budgets by 80 percent in current
dollars over the next decade and keep a straight face, they should
be auditioning for a new run of Make Me Laugh. It’s sad
enough when the GOP proposes to jack spending by
over 40 percent in the name of smaller government, but this is
simply ridiculous.
Judging by the press coverage of the budget, you would be
hard-pressed to have any idea what the Democrats propose for 2014,
the one year that would actually be covered by a budget bill. This
sort of weird and frustrating oversight is typical of all accounts
related to budgets plans. A lot of the coverage of GOP House plan
released earlier this week, for instance, mentioned that Paul
Ryan’s budget would radically alter Medicare in 2024 – a year that
is not even covered in the 10-year “budget window” annual budget
documents present. It was a lot harder to simply find out what the
Republicans propose to spend and raise in 2014 than it was to hear
about all the deficit reduction etc. that a single-year budget plan
was going to create over the next decade.
The same is true with the Democrat’s plan.
Check out this representative CNN Money story on “What’s in the
Democrats’ Budget?” and you’ll find all sorts of fun calculations
of how much the plan cuts deficits as a percentage of GDP, how much
it raises in tax revenues through 2023, and more. What you won’t
find is a simple declaration of what the Senate Democrats say they
want to spend next year and how much they want to raise in tax
revenues.
For the record, those figures are $3.7 trillion and $3 trillion
respectively.
Arguably the most interesting thing – perhaps the only
interesting thing – about those numbers is how close they are to
the 2014 numbers in the GOP budget, which proposes spending $3.5
trillion next year while raising $3 trillion in revenue (see Table
S-1 here). That’s the real news in this budget season: The
Senate Dems and the House GOP are just $200 billion apart on the
spending side for the coming fiscal year. Both sides – and the
president of course,
who has already sworn to stand against any spending or “grand
bargain” that might “gut Medicare or gut Social Security or gut
Medicaid” – could very quickly come to an agreement on next year’s
budget, upon which there seems to be almost complete agreement.
After that, they could actually start seriously and openly
debating matters such as reforming the tax code (all sides agree it
needs a fundamental rethink), what to do about entitlements (all
sides agree that Medicare especially threatens fiscal stability),
and how to seriously address growing debt and deficit issues
(again, all sides agree that deficits need to shrink and debt to
GDP needs to be reduced). Who knows? We could even have the sort of
engaged debate – one that involves the actual citizens and
taxpayers of this fine country – about the size, scope, and
spending of the federal government that Washington and the press
seem so terribly opposed to. … Read More