Found an interesting item on Ohio Senator, Rob Portman’s, website this morning. where he posted an analysis of the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) final report on the cause of the the January 2001 projection of a $5.6 trillion 10 year surplus turning into an actual $6.1 trillion deficit over that time.
The CBO now says that “tax policies enacted a decade ago are responsible for just 16 percent of the swing from surplus to deficit.” And beyond that: Since only 1/4th of the tax cuts went to upper-income earners, just 1/25th of the decline from surpluses to deficits resulted from those cuts.
Portman also noted that: “Given that CBO does not take into account any of the positive impact of tax cuts on investment, savings and economic growth, the percentage was actually even smaller than the 1/25th estimate.”
The CBO report also shows that “new spending and net interest” were three times as responsible for the deficits as the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts – and 12 times as responsible as the upper-income portion of the tax cuts.
However, even more interesting to me was, a second CBO report saying that in both 2008 and 2009 “the highest earning 20% of taxpayers paid 94% of the TOTAL income tax burden -up from 86 percent in 2007, and 81 percent before the 2001 tax cuts.
Therefore, higher-income Americans have already been paying a bigger and bigger part of the total tax burden under the so-called “Bush tax cuts,” and it looks to me like the administration seeks to have them pay it all. And whereas they’ve succeeded in just about killing the economy altogether, it may be the only revenue source they have left.
That’s it for today folks.
Adios
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