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How to Fix the Deficit Without Raising Taxes
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# : |
17055 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
3,073 Words |
| Author
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Alan L. Keyes
Alan Keyes is currently a resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He was assistant
secretary of state for international organizational affairs
from 1985-87. |
On May 7, the White House and congressional leaders convened closed-door budget negotiations "without preconditions" and with "all options on the table.” There was much speculation at the time that these phrases indicated that President Bush was distancing himself from his "read-my-lips" no-new-taxes campaign pledge.
As was to be expected, the usual arbiters of opinion promptly stepped up their propaganda campaign for new taxes. The New York Times, for instance, advised its readers to accept new taxes "without fear,” inasmuch as "sizeable tax increase" are "necessary" to reduce the federal deficit.
The budget summit was convened because the deficit is the nation's most serious economic problem, and it is worse than was estimated early in 1990. Taxpayers deserve a thoughtful and solemn solution. But the history of budget summits over the past decade indicates that the deficit will not be fixed. The outcome is likely to be increased taxes, failure to restrain spending, and higher deficits. In addition, the massive waste, fraud, and mismanagement of our tax dollars will continue.
Knowledgeable observers may be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that the so-called budget summit is actually a tax increase summit; that it is partly a public relations effort to wear down popular resistance to new taxes; that the real issues at these discussions are how to ire of the American people and how the president can appear to keep his pledge.
It would not be surprising if the budget summit culminates in a deal similar to the one that party leaders used last year to resolve the congressional pay raise controversy. In the summer of 1989, Congress scuttled a proposal to raise congressional salaries by 50 percent when tens of thousands of citizens wrote in to protest this flagrant abuse of legislative power. But a few months later, lawmakers voted to increase their salaries by 37 percent. Because party leaders had agreed that the pay raise would not be an issue in the 1990 elections, incumbents were able to award themselves higher salaries without incurring any significant political risks.
Will the budget summit produce an agreement that taxes will not be an issue in the 1990 elections? One scenario is that Republicans will refrain from pinning the blame for a tax hike on the Democrat-controlled Congress, and Democrats will refrain from saying that Bush was lying when he promised not to raise our taxes. Like the pay raise deal, a tax increase deal
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