The Concord Coalition strongly opposes inclusion of a tax cut in a plan to balance the federal budget, and applauds the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities for the study they are releasing today that calls attention to the dimensions of the tax cut program proposed by Senate Republicans.
Tax cuts are forever.
Spending cuts can erode over time, particularly when successive Congresses and Presidents, who were not party to the original agreement, respond to new problems and emerging priorities by expanding existing programs or creating new ones. To state the obvious, balancing the budget with a tax cut requires deeper spending cuts than balancing the budget without a tax cut. There is no way to escape this fact. Spending cuts are already difficult enough to achieve, particularly in the large entitlement programs that make up most of the budget. Inclusion of tax cuts in the budget plan requires even greater reductions in these and other programs and inevitably leads to the charge that this, that, or another spending cut was used to pay for the tax cut rather than to reduce the deficit.