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Thursday, March 01, 2007
Resolution Tea-Leaf Reading: The Conrad Lexicon
If you found Senate Budget Committee chair Kent Conrad's comments on the Budget Resolution quoted in our blog yesterday inscrutable, you are not alone. Policy wonks, journalists, lobbyists, industry groups, and aides have spent much of the past two days trying to interpret the meaning of Conrad's promise, "no tax rate increases," given his broader promise of balancing the budget by 2012.
So we offer an abridged Conrad Lexicon, to assist in parsing the delphic utterance:
No tax rate increases will in be in the budget I propose, I'm not anticipating a tax rate increase in 2011 or 2012 either. [Additional revenues will be] very, very modest and it will be based on going after tax gap and tax reform to broaden the base and keep rates low.
- "no tax rate increases" -- the missing words here are "under current law." Conrad cannot be said to be raising rates if he assumes the Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are not extended, and that rates revert to pre-2001 level under current law, but that those rates wouldn't be increased
- "in 2011 or 2012" -- the budget resolution will have to show revenue estimates reflecting Conrad's policies in the last two years of the five-year balanced budget plan. But if revenues spike in those years, Republicans will argue Democrats are setting the stage for tax increases
- "broaden the base" -- closing the tax gap will probably yield relatively modest additional revenues en route to a balanced budget; so Conrad adds "broadening the base," a euphemism for increasing taxable income (by widening brackets; eliminating exclusions, loopholes, credits, and deductions, etc.)
Posted by Dana Chasin
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