All Americans can have a healthy debate about the giant tax and budget plan being pushed through Congress by Republicans. Everyone reading this column will have different ideas about the best mix of tax cuts and federal spending.
But if you hear anyone in the GOP talking about how these plans will cut the deficit or balance the budget don’t believe that for one minute. Because Republicans aren’t doing anything of the sort.
The buzz phrase “balanced budget” was once a staple of the Republican Party. Not any longer. Like the GOP’s lost focus on standing up to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, most Republicans don’t even talk about balancing the budget in the 21st century.
Just read the GOP budget outline that was approved by the House and Senate which set up the current budget reconciliation process. That forecasts deficits of $12.1 trillion over the next 10 years. The national debt would cross $50 trillion under this GOP plan by 2034.
A handful of Republicans have said that’s not what they signed up for.
“At a bare minimum, the ‘one big beautiful bill’ shouldn’t increase the annual deficit,” U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told us at the Capitol.
U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Athens, joined a letter to U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson this week, arguing that “the reconciliation bill must not add to the deficit.”
“We must hold that line on fiscal discipline to put the country back on a sustainable path,” Clyde and others wrote, calling for $2 trillion in spending cuts.
Cutting $2 trillion over 10 years certainly sounds good. But when deficits are nearly $2 trillion per year, that doesn’t come close to balancing the budget.
New figures out this week showed that in April, the feds spent $89 billion just to pay out interest on the national debt. At that rate, interest payments alone would total over $1 trillion on an annual basis.
We all know that is unacceptable.
Next month will mark 45 years since my first job on Capitol Hill. Back then, there was a Republican from Ohio, Rep. Bob Latta, who would take the House floor to denounce budget policies from Democrats.
“Tax and spend. Tax and spend,” Latta would derisively say again and again, much to the delight of fellow Republicans.
But over the years, the party of fiscal discipline has changed its spots. To paraphrase Latta, the GOP might be best described now as, “tax cuts and spend.“
That combination won’t end the fountain of red ink which threatens to overwhelm Uncle Sam, no matter how big or beautiful this GOP bill might be.
Jamie Dupree has covered national politics and Congress from Washington, D.C., since the Reagan administration. His column appears weekly in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more, check out his Capitol Hill newsletter at http://jamiedupree.substack.com
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