What’s the Democrats’ problem? It’s the spending, stupid.
After four years of crisis-level spending, Democrats now worry about deficits and debt. Strange, isn’t it? The Democrats’ selective attention shows clearly that their priority is not deficits and debt but preserving bloated spending and raising taxes to pay for it.
Democrats have seized on a looming 2026 increase in tax rates as their baseline, instead of today’s tax rates, which were lowered by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. By so doing, they argue that not allowing tax rates to increase above today’s levels is a deficit and debt increase.
From the Democrats’ point of view, tax rates going up (as they will in 2026 for average American taxpayers without legislation preventing this) equates to keeping rates unchanged. It is a neat way of transforming tax cuts that aren’t into the tax hikes that will be. Such is the duplicity of the Democrats; such is the fluidity of baselines.
The baseline that the Democrats don’t talk about is the one that has gotten America into today’s deep deficit and debt hole, and that they supercharged with spending over the previous four years. What Democrats and the Biden administration did was to make the COVID crisis their baseline for spending and keep it there.
Looking at fiscal years, the Congressional Budget Office shows that in 2019, the federal government spent approximately $4.4 trillion — a sizable 8 percent increase over 2018. In........
© The Hill
