|
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Budget Gimmicks in Bush's FY07 Proposal
President Bush's FY 2007 budget includes two proposals that mask the true cost of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which Bush claims to be one of his najor goals in 2006. As this Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report states,
One proposal calls on Congress to adopt a new scoring convention that would make the cost of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts disappear; under this proposal, legislation to make these tax cuts permanent would be officially “scored” as having zero cost. The other proposal would promote a dubious technique for assessing tax policy changes that, depending on the assumptions used, could be used to manufacture cost estimates showing various tax-cut proposals as having little or no cost.
In a column in today's Washington Post, David Broder calls this the "Trillion Dollar Gimmick." The OMB's budget itself, Broder highlights, says, "the 2001 Act and 2003 Act provisions were not intended to be temporary, and not extending them in the baseline raises inappropriate procedural roadblocks to extending them at current rates." In other words, if Congress knew the true cost of making those tax cuts permanent, they would possibly have second thoughts in supporting Bush's plan to make those cuts permanent. As Broder says, this is why it is especially important when looking at the President's budget to "Watch what we do, not what we say."
Posted by Becky Lewis
|