Boehner offsets his spending cuts with even larger tax cuts...for the wealthy

by Jed Lewison
DailyKos

Last Tuesday, John Boehner embraced Paul Ryan's GOP budget plan, billed as a roadmap for reducing the deficit.

From the standpoint of deficit reduction, there's only one problem with the Ryan plan: even though it does have massive spending cuts, eliminating Medicare and privatizing Social Security, it has has even larger tax cuts -- but only for the wealthy. As a result it would actually make the budget deficit worse than it already is, and it would do so with a huge transfer of wealth to the richest people in America. As Paul Krugman puts it, Ryan's plan proves he's the Flimflam man.

Now that Boehner has embraced Ryan's foolish and awful fiscal roadmap, it's starting to dawn on people that the Republican Party itself is proposing the most radically irresponsible budget plan in American history, one that would help only the wealthiest Americans while making our long-term debt situation even worse than it already is.

For example, writing in The Hill today, Walter Alarkon argues:

Most of the budget savings from House GOP Leader John Boehner’s proposed spending cuts would be canceled out by the extension of upper-income tax cuts also backed by Republicans.
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Boehner's spending reductions would total more than $700 billion in savings beyond cuts that Democrats have proposed. But that’s also the approximate cost of extending the tax cuts for upper-income earners, meaning extending those tax cuts would wipe out those savings.
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The proposal backed by Boehner and top Republicans would extend the expiring tax cuts for all taxpayers, including those making more than $200,000. That would cost about $3.7 trillion over the next decade — $3 trillion for the middle-class and low-income earners, and another $700 billion for wealthier taxpayers.

"Doing what the Democrats want to do with taxes, will save somewhere between $700 billion and $900 billion, which is more fiscally conservative," said Roberton Williams, a Tax Policy Center senior fellow.

(More here.)