Powerline:
Everyone knows that America faces a debt crisis that will crush our children’s futures unless we take decisive action to deal with it. Yet the Democrats refuse even to adopt a budget, because they don’t want voters to see that their plan is to pile up more and more debt until the economy collapses, currently projected to occur in around 15 years.
President Obama refuses to adopt a serious attitude toward the debt crisis. One of his few proposals to restore solvency is the “Buffett Rule,” which Wikipedia describes as follows:
A White House statement released in January 2012 defined the rule as part of “measures to ensure everyone making over a million dollars a year pays a minimum effective tax rate of at least 30%…”
But how far would the Buffett Rule go toward solving America’s fiscal problems? Today the Joint Committee on Taxation reported that implementing the rule would raise only $31 billion over the next 11 years. How much of the federal budget would that cover? The JCT did the math, and the result demonstrates the fecklessness of Obama’s approach to budget issues: of the $47,913 trillion (!) the Congressional Budget Office now projects in federal spending over the next 11 years, the Buffett Rule’s $31 billion amounts to a whopping 6/100ths of one percent. Just for fun, I created this graph which puts the futility of Obama’s proposal in perspective. The green bar is federal spending over the next 11 years. The blue bar–actually, it is a line that doesn’t rise perceptibly above the X axis–is revenue gained from the Buffett Rule.
When it comes to federal spending, debt and the economy, the Democrats have nothing to offer but transparent demagoguery. The only leadership on these issues comes from Paul Ryan and the Congressional Republicans.
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