Topic: Tax and Budget Policy

An Unconstitutional Tax Bill in Virginia?

By
David Boaz

My long-ago colleague Norman Leahy, once a young research assistant at the Cato Institute, has an op-ed in the Washington Post today. I wonder where he got the idea that an act of the legislature is invalid just because it violates the state constitution.

Those praising the Virginia General Assembly’s transportation compromise may not realize that the bill runs afoul of the plain language in the state’s constitution.

Virginia’s constitution is clear that the General Assembly can impose only uniform taxes across the state for similar activities. But the bill that emerged from the House-Senate conference committee last weekend upsets the historic balance between localities and state government; it contains new provisions about taxation, some of which would effectively set up a two-tier system for residents in certain parts of the state. It’s difficult to see how some of these provisions could survive legal challenge….

As a constitutional matter, these local tax provisions could probably be struck down without affecting the rest of the legislation.

But few should know better than Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) that state legislators don’t have the power to impose a discriminatory local tax. He was the state’s attorney general when his office defended before the state Supreme Court the General Assembly’s previous attempt at a transportation tax package. The court rejected the argument.

 

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Tax and Budget Policy

Sequestration Will Not Make the United States Less Safe

By
Christopher A. Preble

Will sequestration undermine U.S. national security? Hardly. Today, the Cato Institute released a new infographic putting these minor cuts in perspective.

Military spending will remain at roughly 2006 levels—$603 billion, higher than peak U.S. spending during the Cold War. Meanwhile, we live in a safer world. The Soviet Union has been dead for more than two decades; no other nation, or combination of nations, has emerged since that can pose a comparable threat. We should have a defense budget that reflects this reality.

To be clear, sequestration was no one’s first choice. But the alternative—ever-increasing military spending detached from a legitimate debate over strategy—is worse. We should have had such a debate, one over the roles and missions of the U.S. military, long before this day of reckoning. And politicians could have pursued serious proposals to prudently reduce military spending. Instead, they chose the easy way out, avoiding difficult decisions that would have allowed for smarter cuts.

Until now, there have been few constraints on Washington’s ability to spend what it pleases on the military. As my colleagues Benjamin Friedman and Justin Logan put it, Americans “buy defense like rich people shop, ignoring the balances of costs and benefits.”

Policymakers can’t postpone the tradeoffs forever, especially when the public has grown increasingly weary of foreign entanglements. If forced to choose between higher taxes, less military spending, or lower domestic spending, in order to balance the budget, the military fares least well, with solid pluralities favoring cuts in military spending over cuts in other programs.

Which is why it is so important to get the foreign policy debate right. If we are going to give our military less, we need to think about asking it to do less.

A number of experts have done that, rethinking the military’s purpose, and documenting the savings that would flow from a more modest foreign policy. The sequester is a first step, albeit an imperfect one, that could finally compel policymakers to do the same.

Download and share this infographic on your blog, Twitter, or Facebook.

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Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

Earth to New York Times: Please Show Us these “Deep Spending Cuts” You Keep Writing About

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

Sigh. I feel like a modern-day Sisyphus. Except I’m not pushing a rock up a hill, only to then watch it roll back down.

Compared to educating journalists about fiscal policy, this is an easy task

I have a far more frustrating job. I have to read the same nonsense day after day about “deep spending cuts” even though I keep explaining to journalists that a sequester merely means that spending climbs by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years rather than $2.5 trillion.

The latest example comes from the New York Times, which just reportedabout “deep automatic spending cuts that will strike hard” without bothering to provide a single concrete number about spending levels in any fiscal year.

Yes, you read correctly. A story about budget cuts did not have any numbers for spending in FY2013, FY2014, or any other fiscal year.

So, for the umpteenth time, here are the actual numbers from the Congressional Budget Office showing what will happen to spending over the next 10 years if we have a sequester.

Sequester 2013

I don’t mean to pick on the New York Times. Yes, the self-styled paper of record has been guilty in the past of turning budget increases into spending cuts, but the Washington Post is guilty of the same sin, having actually written in 2011that reducing a $3.8 trillion budget by $6 billion would “slash spending.”

And the NYT story actually has some decent reporting on how Republicans so far have (fingers crossed) avoided the tax-increase trap that Obama thought the sequester would create.

But one would still like to think that Journalism 101 teaches reporters to include a few hard facts when writing stories. Particularly if they’re going to use dramatic adjectives to describe what supposedly will happen.

Anyhow, this is just part of a larger problem. As I explained in these John Stossel and Judge Napolitano interviews, the politicians and interest groups have given us a budget process that assumes ever-increasing spending levels, which then allows them to make hysterical claims about “savage” and “draconian” cuts whenever spending doesn’t rise as fast as some hypothetical baseline.

This is why almost nobody understands that it’s actually relatively simple to balance the budget with a modest bit of spending restraint. My goal is reducing the burden of government spending, not fiscal balance, but it’s worth noting that we’d have a balanced budget in just 10 years if spending grew by “only” 3.4 percent annually.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

Only Doom Without the Denominator

By
Neal McCluskey

The Obama administration tried to turn the doom-and-gloom up a notch over the weekend, releasing reports on how many employees each state could lose if sequestration isn’t stopped. Teachers were prominently featured, of course, because nothing scares people like the prospect of their kids not getting educated.

“Could” is a crucial word here, because it is entirely possible that savings could be found that would negate the need to dismiss people. For instance, unnecessary purchases could be cancelled, or all employees could take small pay cuts. But suppose worst-case firings did come. How horrific would the education damage be?

It turns out, once you look at the overall staffing picture, not very. Using a compilation of the state reports put together by the Washington Post, as well as Digest of Education Statistics staffing data, we assembled the following table calculating how big a percentage of public school employees in each state would disappear in the worst-case scenario. Unlike the administration, we included the numerator and the denominator.

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Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, General, Tax and Budget Policy

Sequestration Cuts in Perspective

By
Tad DeHaven

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the $85 billion in sequestration spending cuts translates into $44 billion reduction in actual federal outlays for 2013. The following chart puts that figure in perspective. 

To balance the budget this year, the reduction in outlays would have to be almost 20 times larger. 

One might argue that it isn’t fair to compare the cuts to total spending because sequestration barely touches entitlement spending, which is the budget’s 800-lb gorilla. I acknowledge that sequestration isn’t the ideal for cutting spending. So by all means, let’s target the whole ball of wax and dramatically increase the amount to be cut. 

Topics: 
General, Tax and Budget Policy

Why the Areas Affected by Sequestration Should be Cut

By
Tad DeHaven

The scheduled implementation of the sequestration spending cuts is a little more than a week away, which has Republicans, Democrats, bureaucrats, special interests, and the media warning that the apocalypse is nigh. Sequestration isn’t the ideal way to cut spending, but it would be a start. And despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the areas of federal spending targeted by sequestration should be cut.

Many of these areas have been covered by Cato’s Downsizing Government website. The following is a “guide” for those who are interested in alternative points of view (and who haven’t already sought refuge in a bunker):

Downsizing discusses other agencies and programs that would be cut (and more), but those are some of the more prominent areas that are being discussed. 

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

Are Spending Cuts Good Politics?

By
Chris Edwards

Grover Cleveland says “yes.”

Calvin Coolidge says “yes.”

Chris Edwards says “yes.” From Downsizing the Federal Government: 

Another myth is that policymakers cannot make budget cuts without a backlash from voters. Yet reform efforts in the 1990s did not lead to a voter rebuke. In 1996, the Republicans were denounced viciously when they were reforming welfare. But they stuck together and succeeded, and today the achievement is widely hailed. Also in the 1990s, the Republicans proposed reductions to many sensitive programs including Medicare, Medicaid, education, housing, and farm subsidies. In their budget plan for 1996, House Republicans voted to abolish more than 200 programs including whole departments and agencies. 

The Republicans who led on these reforms were not thrown out of office, despite many of them being specifically targeted for defeat in 1996. The most hardcore budget cutters in the 104th Congress were freshmen who were reelected with larger vote margins than they had received in 1994. They included John Shadegg and Matt Salmon of Arizona, Joe Scarborough of Florida, David McIntosh and Mark Souder of Indiana, Steve Largent and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Van Hilleary of Tennessee, and Mark Neumann of Wisconsin. Indeed, many budget-cutting Republican freshman got reelected in districts that went for Bill Clinton on the presidential ticket in 1996. The high-profile leader of the House budget cutters, John Kasich (R-Ohio), consistently won reelection throughout the 1990s with two-to-one margins. In sum, cutting the budget can be good politics when done in a serious and up-front manner. 

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

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