Pay as you go

How exactly do you make sense of the Republican position on the budget anymore? Yesterday the Senate voted on a proposal to restore the "pay-as-you-go" budget rule that says if you want to cut taxes or raise spending, you need to specify offsetting spending cuts or tax increases so that you don't add to the budget deficit. Pay as you go was pushed by Republicans in the early 1990s and it was a major contributor to the elimination of the budget deficit. Yesterday, the proposal failed on a 50-50 vote, with every Democrat voting in favor and all but a handful of Republicans voting against.

The NYTimes explains: "But Republicans said the push to add the rules to the budget was a back-door effort to make it harder to extend President Bush's tax cuts." No, it's a front-door, in-your-face effort to make tax cutters pay for their tax cuts by cutting spending.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is said to have said that "since backers of the proposed enforcement rule would be unlikely to vote for the spending reductions needed to pay for tax breaks, 'what they are going to do is vote not to have tax cuts.'" Um, yeah, that's kind of the idea. You don't get your tax cuts if you don't cut spending by the same amount.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) is quoted thusly: "The practical effect of this is to raise taxes." So any failure to cut taxes is now a decision to raise taxes. Democrats - quickly, propose elimination of all taxes! When Republicans object, they're tax increasers!

So what these Republicans are saying is that tax cuts are desirable even if they are never matched by a reduction in spending but instead are financed by perpetual borrowing. Here I had bought into the "starve the beast" argument that the tax cuts were a blunt weapon to force reductions in spending. Now you present them with the opportunity to make the spending cuts, you beg them to do it so we can please please have our tax cuts, and they demur. Apparently we can spend whatever we want and tax as little as we want with no consequence.

I'm pretty sure Republicans know how to add. I think they just choose not to.

By the way, on a 50-50 vote the Vice President can cast the deciding vote. In this case Dick Cheney chose not to. So the blame for the failure of pay as you go, hence the blame for the next three years at least of huge budget deficits, falls squarely on the shoulders of the administration. But I guess we knew that already.