Saturday, March 09, 2013

CBO Report Shows Excessive Spending, Not Insufficient Taxation, Explains Our Deficits

 by Timothy H. Lee

In 2007, the federal government took in an all-time record $2.6 trillion in revenues. 

That year’s deficit was merely $161 billion – quaint in retrospect. 

This year, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), incoming federal revenues will break that 2007 record and reach a new all-time high of $2.7 trillion. 

Yet this year’s deficit will be nearly $1 trillion. 

So if revenues for 2007 and 2013 are the same, yet the 2013 deficit is nearly one trillion dollars, we can isolate the obvious culprit:  excessive spending. 

For the record, it should also be noted that 2007 was the last year in which Republicans controlled Congress and the White House; it was several years into the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and it was the year in which cumulative spending on the Iraq and Afghan wars peaked.

Accordingly, it is false for anyone to blame the “Bush tax cuts,” wars “that weren’t paid for” or supposedly spendthrift Republicans as the deficit bogeymen.  We had never witnessed a trillion-dollar deficit in our nation’s history, but in the years since Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid captured Congressional control and Barack Obama captured the White House, we have seen four trillion-dollar deficits in a row. 

Like metronomes, however, liberals continue to insist that insufficient taxation is our problem.  Just weeks ago on January 1, Barack Obama and his allies secured tax increases with no corresponding spending cuts through the “fiscal cliff” resolution.  Yet they now claim that both the March 1 sequester and the March 27 funding expiration demand a new round of tax increases. 

But the straightforward budgetary numbers, brought into stark relief by the CBO projection, contradict that logic.

2 comments:

Food for Thought said...

Good column...how did we go from a low deficit in 2007 to the high one this year....where is all that spending....is it just in the agencies who just took the hit, or is it in all the entitlements, or is it ARRA?

Anonymous said...

Maybe this author should read this link:

http://useconomy.about.com/od/fiscalpolicy/p/US_Debt.htm