Cutting Through the Rhetoric on Spending

In Washington, it’s often hard to cut through it all the political rhetoric and examine the facts of what is being claimed. Today’s New York Times did that with a critical issue: government spending.

In “As G.O.P. Seeks Spending Cuts, Details Are Scarce,” David Herszenhorn reports that all over the country, Congressional Republicans are calling for spending restraint, but offering few if any details on what they would cut.

The scarcity of those details is probably explained by the fact that, as the Times puts it, “federal budget statistics show that Republican policies over the last decade, and the cost of the two wars, added far more to the deficit than initiatives approved by the Democratic Congress since 2006.” In particular, the previous administration’s failure to pay for two large tax cuts and a prescription drug benefit for Medicare added trillions of dollars to our deficits. Congressional Republicans certainly don’t mention that their call to extend tax cuts to the wealthiest of the wealthy would add another $700 billion to the deficit or that their call to repeal the Affordable Care Act actually would make the deficit $100 billion larger over the next decade.
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