Tag Archives: Tax Increase

News

CBO report predicts 30% higher taxes and trillion-plus dollar deficit

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CNS News reports.

Excerpt:

The amount of money the federal government takes out of the U.S. economy in taxes will increase by more than 30 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the Budget and Economic Outlook published today by the CBO.

At the same time, according to CBO, the economy will remain sluggish, partly because of higher taxes.

“In particular, between 2012 and 2014, revenues in CBO’s baseline shoot up by more than 30 percent,” said CBO, “mostly because of the recent or scheduled expirations of tax provisions, such as those that lower income tax rates and limit the reach of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), and the imposition of new taxes, fees, and penalties that are scheduled to go into effect.”

The U.S. economy, CBO projects, will perform “below its potential” for another six years and unemployment will remain above 7 percent for another three.

Fox News reports that the deficit will remain above 1 trillion dollars.

Excerpt:

A new budget report released Tuesday predicts the U.S. government will run a $1.1 trillion deficit in the fiscal year that ends in September, the fourth year in a row over $1 trillion, though a slight dip from last year.

[…]The report is yet another reminder of the perilous fiscal situation the government is in, but it is commonly assumed that President Barack Obama and lawmakers in Congress that little will be accomplished on the deficit issue during an election year.

[…]”Four straight years of trillion-dollar deficits, no credible plan to lift the crushing burden of debt,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Republican. “The president and his party’s leaders have fallen short in their duty to tackle our generation’s most pressing fiscal and economic challenges.”

“We will not solve this problem unless both sides, Democrats and Republicans, are willing to move off their fixed positions and find common ground,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a Democrat. “Republicans must be willing to put [tax increases] on the table.”

The study also predicts modest economic growth of 2 percent this year and forecasts that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent this year and next. That is based on an assumption that President Barack Obama will fail to win renewal of payroll tax cuts and jobless benefits by the end of next month.

That jobless rate is higher than the rates that contributed to losses by Presidents Jimmy Carter (7.5 percent) and George H.W. Bush (7.4 percent). The study predicts unemployment to remain above roughly 5 percent — until 2016. The agency also predicts that unemployment will remain at 7 percent or above through 2015

Deficits in 2007 under George W. Bush were $160 billion and the unemployment rate was around 4-5%.

The CBO report also shows that the real unemployment rate is 10%.

News

Did George W. Bush’s tax cuts cause Obama’s trillion dollar budget deficits?

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Let’s take a look at the budget deficits again, keeping in mind that the last Republican budget was the 2007 budget. In January of 2007, the Democrats took control of the House and Senate, and all spending was in Democrat control until January of 2011, when the Republicans took back the House.

Obama Budget Deficit 2011
Obama Budget Deficit 2011

Next, let’s see what impact the Bush tax cuts from 2001 and 2003 had on tax revenue:

Federal receipts after Bush tax cuts
Federal receipts (1994-2008)

From the chart:

  • Revenue in 2001 was 2.0 trillion in the year of the first round of tax cuts
  • Revenue in 2003 was 1.8 trillion in the year of the second round of tax cuts
  • Revenue then rose in each subsequent year, ending at 2.6 trillion in 2007, when the Democrats took over the House and Senate
  • In 2007, Bush was only spending about 2.8 trillion – very close to what he was taking receiving in tax revenues
  • The budget deficit went down in each year after both tax cuts were in place (2004), until the Democrats took over the House and Senate
  • Obama is currently spending over 3.8 trillion per year, but he is only receiving about 2.2 trillion in revenue.
  • It’s a spending problem, not a revenue problem

Doug Ross explains:

According to the OMB’s own figures, the Bush tax cuts resulted in an explosion of revenue to the U.S. government.

That’s not to say Bush wasn’t a profligate spender — he was. But in virtually no cases were Democrats arguing that he spend less (unless you count national security).

In fact, fiscal conservatives opposed Bush’s absurd policies on spending, amnesty and the expansion of Medicare.

But no one in world history has ever spent money like Barack Obama.

These statements are indisputable.

Which is why they are certain to be rejected by the diminishing cadre of Obama-Democrat drones, who appear to be completely immune to facts, logic and reason.

And let’s just see what happened to the unemployment rate since the Democrats took over spending in January of 2007:

Unemployment Rate (Not seasonally adusted)
Unemployment Rate (Not seasonally adusted)

There are a lot of people who don’t know about these numbers because they watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the Comedy Channel, or Rachel Maddow and Ed Schulz on MSNBC.

I actually spoke to someone who voted for Obama about these numbers. He said that 2.6 trillion in tax revenues was worse than 2.0 trillion in tax revenues. And he said that a 4.3% unemployment rate was WORSE than a 9.2% unemployment rate. And he also said that a $160 billion dollar deficit was WORSE than a $1650 billion dollar deficit. Ok I just made that up, but still. That’s how Democrats think. Tax and spend.

News

John Boehner says no to Obama’s plan to raise taxes by 2 trillion

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Republican Speaker John Boehner
Republican House Speaker John Boehner

From the leftist Washington Post.

Excerpt:

Senate Democrats have drafted a sweeping debt-reduction plan that would slice $4 trillion from projected borrowing over the next decade without touching the expensive health and retirement programs targeted by President Obama.

Instead, Senate Democrats are proposing to stabilize borrowing through sharp cuts at the Pentagon and other government agencies, as well as $2 trillion in new taxes…

[…]Republicans dismissed the Democratic blueprint, saying higher taxes would be devastating to an economy already weighed down by a 9.2 percent unemployment rate. In their spending plan, House Republicans proposed to save $4 trillion entirely through spending cuts; they would also eliminate Medicare as an open-ended entitlement after 2021.

“If they’re calling for $2 trillion in tax hikes in the middle of a jobs crisis, it’s little wonder that it’s been 800 days since Senate Democrats passed a budget,” said McConnell spokesman Don Stewart.

Since early this year, Senate Democrats have struggled to draft a spending plan. Moderates refused to endorse any blueprint that included big annual budget deficits or big tax hikes. Liberals, meanwhile, opposed sharp cuts to social programs. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the senior Budget Committee Republican, has relentlessly hammered Democrats for their failure to adopt a budget.

Although the new document is unlikely to be officially adopted, it was embraced by a majority of Senate Democrats when Conrad presented it at a closed-door luncheon earlier this week, aides said.

Under the blueprint, the top income tax rate would rise to 39.6 percent for individuals earning more than $500,000 a year and families earning more than $1 million. That group, which constitutes the nation’s richest 1 percent of households, would also pay a 20 percent rate on capital gains and dividends, rather than the 15 percent rate now in effect.

John Boehner says no way.

Excerpt:

Speaker John A. Boehner told President Obama on Saturday night he will not agree to the president’s most ambitious plan for deficit reduction, citing the administration’s pursuit of tax increases as one of the main hurdles.

The Democrats want to tax investors and job creators. Is it any wonder that this administration has been unable to create jobs? They keep taxing and regulating the small businesses and investors who enable the creation of the majority of new private sector jobs, then are shocked to find that no new jobs are being created. When will they learn that “taxing the rich” just means “taxing the job creators”?

Why are companies not hiring?

Companies are not hiring because the Democrats spent too much, and now they want to raise taxes. Higher taxes makes companies not hire workers.

Look at this diagram:

Republican control of House = low unemployment

Compare the unemployment rates when Republican Newt Gingrich was in charge of the House, to when Nancy Pelosi was in charge:

Gingrich versus Pelosi unemployment graph
Unemployment: Gingrich ('95-'99) vs Pelosi ('07-'10)

Nancy Pelosi added 5.34 trillion to the national debt in 4 years! If you are running a business, then you STOP hiring when you see that the government is spending so much that new taxes are inevitable. You cannot argue with these facts – more spending means higher unemployment, BECAUSE more spending raises fears of higher taxes on job creators. And that’s exactly what Obama is now threatening, and why the unemployment rate is going UP not DOWN. Newt Gingrich added only ONE TRILLION to the national debt between 1994 and 1999. ONE TRILLION. That’s bad, but it’s not FIVE TRILLION as under Pelosi.

Prior to January 2007, George W. Bush’s unemployment rate was down below 5%. Job creators knew that he wasn’t going to come after them with tax hikes and burdensome regulations. You can’t create jobs by punishing job creators. The trade-off of low tax rates for the wealthy is a low unemployment rate. Those are the facts, and we have to live with reality as it is.