Quick quiz: what’s going to cost the U.S. more over the next decade: the exploding costs of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare or Bush’s tax cuts? Despite all the talk we hear about the prior, it’s not even close — the tax cuts are poised to cost the treasury far, far, more.
And yet, every Republican presidential candidate in the field, to a man, vows to make each of Bush’s cut permanent, beyond their scheduled expiration in 2010. As the NYT’s Tom Redburn notes today, over the next 10 years, it will cost “roughly $2.5 trillion in revenues now expected under current law. And that’s just the beginning.”
Even without taking on any additional tasks, merely meeting the government’s existing obligations — mostly to pay for the military and to keep up with the health care and retirement needs of the elderly — would send the budget deficit soaring, pushing overall federal debt held by the public from under 50 percent of the size of the nation’s economy today to over 300 percent by 2050.
“The combination of roughly constant revenues and significantly rising expenditures would quickly create an unstable fiscal situation,” the [Congressional Budget Office] report notes alarmingly, but in its characteristically dry and understated manner.
How would the Republican candidates deal with this problem? Most say they would try to hold down spending — and cut taxes even more.
Keep in mind, most of the GOP field, including Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, are on record believing in the Tax Fairy — tax cuts can pay for themselves with increased revenue. It’s transparent nonsense, but it helps explain why the Republican field doesn’t even pretend to care about fiscal sanity.