By Larry Kudlow. No matter how you slice the Obama budget pie, the inescapable fact is that the president wants to get rid of the roughly $1 trillion budget-cutting sequester and substitute in a $1 trillion-plus tax hike. In other words, more spending, more taxing. Growth-busting. The GOP should just say no.
And let me provide some counsel to my Republican friends in Washington, in particular in the House. Balanced budgets don’t create growth. This mantra is wrong. It’s growth that creates balanced budgets.
Cut spending? That’s a pro-growth measure. Lower tax rates? Another pro-growth measure. The combination of limited government and true tax reform will balance the budget soon enough, with government coming in at a smaller share of gross domestic product while sufficient investment and work incentives get growth moving toward the 4 or 5 percent range.
That kind of growth would make up for the lost ground of the past 15 years. And if you add in deregulation and a sound King Dollar, you’d have a growth budget that would propel America back into prosperity.
Indeed, with some tweaking of eligibility requirements, a true economic-growth budget would lower food stamp enrollment, unemployment compensation, disability benefits and other forms of welfare-dependency spending that plague the country. Medicare is a more complex issue, but Social Security would be solved by a long-run growth spurt. Read more from this story HERE.
Obama budget ‘compromise?’ No way, says the GOP
By Brad Knickerbocker. The budget President Obama delivered to Congress this week was presented as a compromise package, a path to some sort of “grand bargain” involving taxes and spending.
“I don’t believe that all these ideas are optimal,” the president acknowledged. “But I’m willing to accept them as part of a compromise if and only if they contain protections for the most vulnerable Americans.”
Indeed, his budget did draw immediate sniping from Obama’s liberal base as well as from Republican lawmakers. A particular affront to the left is the tweaking envisioned for Medicare, revealed Friday in congressional testimony by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
The Obama budget also would change the way inflation is figured for Social Security recipients, and it raises taxes on higher-income households. But “compromise?” No way, the GOP charged in its Saturday radio/Internet address.
Speaking on behalf of her party, freshman Rep. Jackie Walorski (R) of Indiana called it “a blank check for more spending and more debt.” “Even when the president’s budget offers signs of common ground – like modest entitlement reforms – he says he won’t follow through unless he can impose more tax increases,” Rep. Walorski said. “Worst of all, the White House says the president’s budget never balances – ever, failing to meet the most basic principle of budgeting for every family and small business.” Read more from this story HERE.
