United Liberty

In reporting on the plan unveiled by Senate Republicans to extend all of the Bush tax cuts, a Washington Post report states that the proposal would “deprive” of revenues:

Even as they hammer Democrats for running up record budget deficits, Senate Republicans are rolling out a plan to permanently extend an array of expiring tax breaks that would deprive the Treasury of more than $4 trillion over the next decade, nearly doubling projected deficits over that period unless dramatic spending cuts are made.

The measure, introduced by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) this week, would permanently extend the George W. Bush-era income tax cuts that benefit virtually every U.S. taxpayer, rein in the alternative minimum tax and limit the estate tax to estates worth more than $5 million for individuals or $10 million for couples.

Aides to McConnell said they have yet to receive a cost estimate for the measure. But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently forecast that a similar, slightly more expensive package that includes a full repeal of the estate tax would force the nation to borrow an additional $3.9 trillion over the next decade and increase interest payments on the national debt by $950 billion. That’s more than four times the projected deficit impact of President Obama’s health-care overhaul and stimulus package combined.

Yes, Republicans are going to have to press for spending cuts to offset extension of the tax cuts, something that William Niskanen, chairman emeritus of the Cato Institute, explains is absolutely necessary. This is an area that the tea party movement is going to have to press the GOP on, as Matt Kibbe recently explained, holding them accountable to cut spending. And, I think that with a Republican-controlled Congress and a Democratic president, the recipe is right to begin to bring some form of fiscal sanity back to Washington.

But Republicans should have no sympathy for trying “deprive” the federal government of tax revenues. That money does NOT belong to the federal government, it belongs to income earners, who have the money taken from them by force to pay for vote buying programs, pork projects, ObamaCare, entitlements, a broken foreign policy and literally anything else that Congress and the president can dream up.