“This is just me now, I’m not speaking for the White House — I think you could tax me at a 100 percent and you wouldn’t balance the budget,” said Clinton, who has earned tens of millions of dollars since leaving office. “We are all going to have to contribute to this, and if middle class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth to the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates [from] when I was president” – before the Bush tax cuts.
In short, Politico is being intellectually dishonest in its headline depiction of what Clinton said. Unlike most other Democrats, the former President is not saying raising taxes now is good policy. He is saying that if we had a good economy and if middle-class wages were going up, most earners wouldn’t mind paying a higher rate of their income to federal taxes.
Related, both the article and the headline ignore some of Clinton’s other remarks. Via Market Watch:
Clinton said Democrats should embrace some reform proposals of Medicare, Medicaid and other health care programs that are already “floating out there.” The White House’s latest budget only calls for $300 billion in spending cuts from modest changes to these programs. Clinton said there are about one trillion dollars in savings that are just low-hanging fruit for politicians.
Spending would fall dramatically if the government made reducing diabetes a priority, got serious about reducing incentives for too many tests, and also cut wasteful spending on paperwork, he said. “I think Democrats should be willing to gamble” on these policy shifts, Clinton said. At the moment, the White House budget plan cuts discretionary spending by too much in order not to trim health care spending, he said.
So rather than simply be a tax-and-spend Democrat, Clinton is actually talking about combining some tax increases during a good economy that has growth for the middle class with simple, substantive cuts to federal spending that would substantially diminish our forthcoming trillion-dollar deficit for fiscal year 2012. This is a very different story than that which Politico would have the reader believe.
In the final conclusion, of course, Americans don’t need tax increases to balance the budget. The most effective tax reforms would end up with either a national sales tax or a low, flat-rate income tax with no or minimal loopholes. In fact, we could eventually lower taxes further if we eliminated the absurd level of fraud, duplicity, etc. the federal government has in it and significantly cut the size of the federal bureaucracy – including at the DoD – while phasing in aggressive entitlement reforms and increased our use of domestic energy resources. These changes would cause our budget to shrink drastically, the economy to take off, and eliminate the “need” to raise taxes on any earners, especially those in the flatlining middle class, as the federal government’s revenues would be going up relative to the declining size of the budget.
What is holding up these kinds of reforms? The voters. Enacting the above reforms would require substantial political courage in Congress, and in an election year this is tough to find. While it is easy and right to blame Washington for prioritizing elections over the future of the country, it is also unfortunately the fault of the voters who may choose to ignore the fiscal cliff the nation is headed towards, and the lifelong recession the Debt-Paying Generation is likely to face.
[This post was originally published at Race42012.com]
Dustin Siggins is a policy and politics blogger, and is the co-author of a forthcoming book on the national debt with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation.
This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.
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