To:\tRep. Todd Young
\n\tU.S. House of Representatives, IN-09<\/p>\n
Cc:\tSen. Richard Lugar, Sen. Dan Coats, Pres. Barack Obama<\/p>\n
Subj:\tYour support of the \u201cCut, Cap, and Balance Act\u201d<\/p>\n
Rep. Young, <\/p>\n
I received your letter regarding your support for the nonsensical \u201cCut, Cap, and Balance Act\u201d, which is nothing but one more vehicle designed to insure the middle class and poor pay the costs of their corporate overlords\u2019 folly, while continuing to see their own wages and access to sustainable economic conditions further deteriorate. It is just one more example of the Republicans\u2019 and their guru Grover Norquist\u2019s vision of strangling government until it dies in the bathtub.<\/p>\n
FWIW, not that I have any great expectation you will actually read and digest it, I am including below an analysis of this ridiculous proposal, exposing it for the folly and further erosion of values and attack on rational management of the economy that it is.<\/p>\n
As I have said before, and will repeat, and it is a simple truth:
\n1.\tThe need for rational government will not go away. Republicans right now are irrational.
\n2.\tThe need for revenues will not go away. The 50% tax decrease on the richest Americans that has happened in the past 12 years MUST expire.
\n3.\tCorporations MUST start paying their fair share of taxes, by ending all loopholes, subsidies, and hiding profits in off shore accounts.
\n4.\tHedge fund managers and others in the financial industry must see their tax loopholes, which tax them at capital gains rates, ended. They should be paying at the same salary rates as the rest of us working class (or retired, in my case) peons.<\/p>\n
Thanks.<\/p>\n
I would suggest any readers follow the link and read the entire article. Here is the gist.<\/p>\n
\nThe \u201cCut, Cap, and Balance Act\u201d that the House of Representatives will vote on next week stands out as one of the most ideologically extreme pieces of major budget legislation to come before Congress in years, if not decades. It would go a substantial way toward enshrining Grover Norquist\u2019s version of America into law.
\n…
\nThe \u201cCut, Cap, and Balance Act\u201d that House Republican leaders are circulating achieves these results through a multi-faceted attack on the federal government. It would require that total federal spending shrink to about 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) starting in 2015 (by writing the Ryan budget\u2019s year-by-year expenditure levels as a share of GDP into law, as caps to be enforced through automatic across-the-board budget cuts if the caps otherwise wouldn\u2019t be met). The Ryan budget would slash non-security discretionary programs by 33 percent by 2021 (relative to CBO\u2019s January baseline), cut Medicaid by $1.4 trillion over the decade, and cut an array of other programs from Medicare to Pell Grants, while shielding the defense budget and further cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.<\/p>\nIn addition, as noted, the measure seeks to render it virtually impossible to raise new revenue by barring the necessary increase in the debt limit until both houses of Congress have approved a constitutional amendment which requires that the budget be balanced every year, that no measure raising any taxes may pass Congress unless two-thirds of the House and Senate approve it, and that budget cuts deeper than Ryan\u2019s be instituted. <\/p>\n
Adding to the extreme nature of the measure, the legislation also reverses a feature of every law of the past quarter-century that has contained a fiscal target or standard enforced by across-the-board cuts. Since the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law of 1985, all such laws have exempted the core basic assistance programs for the poorest Americans from such across-the-board cuts. \u201cCut, Cap, and Balance,\u201d by contrast, specifically subjects all such programs to across-the-board cuts if its spending caps would be exceeded.<\/p>\n
It does so even as it seeks to erect a constitutional firewall to safeguard tax cuts and tax breaks for the most well-off Americans. Thus, an impoverished elderly widow living on Supplemental Security Income \u2014 which provides benefits that lift people to just 75 percent of the poverty line \u2014 could have her assistance cut back under the measure\u2019s across-the-board budget cuts even as millionaire hedge-fund managers retained their lucrative carried-interest tax breaks. <\/p>\n