If the Republicans take the White House in November we’ll see big tax cuts and big deficits.
What would happen to the country in the Republicans take the White House and hold Congress in next year’s elections? It’s certainly a possibility and if the Republicans do get unified control over the executive and legislative branches we could see a lot of changes when it comes to taxes and spending. After all basically all the Republicans running for the presidency have already signed on to big tax cuts targeting the rich to some degree or another, and none have come up with a realistic way to pay for it.
As Jonathan Bernstein put it yesterday:
Every Republican candidate for 2016 is pushing some tax cut, several with enough specificity that outside groups are able to “score” their distribution and budget effects.
Nevertheless, don’t expect any of the ambitious plans for an entirely new system to be enacted. Major changes are difficult. Tax reform at its best is a tough political sell once the politicians start discussing details. Any change that removes current tax preferences — deductions, credits and exemptions, for example — creates losers, even if more people are winners through lower rates overall. In addition, any general gains in economic growth projected to happen from a more efficient tax system won’t be visible at all to people, at least not as a consequence of tax law…
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free…Instead, expect something rather like what Marco Rubio is proposing: Big cuts for the rich, more modest cuts for the middle class, and cuts in the form of tax credits even for the poor. In other words, for All of the Above (or almost all of them).
The end result will be big deficits of course. Simply because Republicans have never come up with concrete plans to actually cut the lions share of federal spending: entitlements and the military. Indeed even “moderate” Republican candidates like Ohio Governor John Kasich has called for a big increase in military spending.
Meanwhile count me skeptical when it comes to actually reducing spending on Social Security and Medicare. After all the modern Republican Party is heavily dependent on older voters making it highly unlikely any major cuts would happen right away. And since no current Congress can bind the hands of what a future Congress can do, cuts to Social Security and Medicare promised in the future could easily be tossed out under another president when it came time for them to be phased in.
Meanwhile there would probably be some cuts to some domestic programs, but the Federal Government simply doesn’t spend enough on things like SNAP or the National Forrest Service to balance out the huge tax cuts Republicans have been proposing. Indeed the purposed increase in defense spending might offset these sorts of cuts from the get go.
All of this should sound familiar of course. Both Reagan and George W. Bush pursed the path of cutting taxes without major cuts to spending when they first came into office, and as a result they both saw the deficit soar. All the evidence points to a future Republican president doing the exact same thing.
So much for all the talk about debt and deficits we’ve been hearing since 2009. Republicans save that for when the Democrats are in the White House.
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