For those of you who have asked, I have produced an outline of my recent talk on the Fiscal Cliff: How We Got Here & Where Do We Go? This is a handy cheat sheet that outlines the problems that contributed to our current situation and what we can do to make long-lasting, systemic changes.
A. How Did We Get Here?
1. Spending
a) Spending up estimated 27% since 2008 (cite: Forbes)
b) Trillion dollar deficits each year since 2009 (cite: OMB)
c) Debt-GDP ratio up from just over half of GDP in 2009 to nearly three-fourths in 2012. (cite: Heritage)
2. Taxes
a) Bush “tax cuts”
b) Uncertainty with tax rates
c) New taxes slated for 2013
3. Entitlements
a) Social Security
b) Medicare/Medicaid
c) Food Stamps
d) Disability
4. Healthcare
a) Cost of Obamacare – $1.93 Trillion in first decade (cite: Weekly Standard)
b) Taxes associated with Obamacare
1. Health Insurers Tax
2. Surtax on Investment Income: (3.8%)
3. Health care deduction AGI haircut (from 7.5% – to 10%)
4. Hike in Medicare Payroll Tax: (.9%)
5. Medical Excise Tax
5. Regulations
a) Code of Federal Regulations has increased by 11,327 pages — a 7.4% increase since 2009
b) Examples
1. EPA
2. FDA
3. NRLB
4. IRS
B. Where Do We Go?
1. Cut Spending
a) First, go back to FY2008 spending levels
b) Cut Federal Workforce by at least 10%, which should be commensurate with spending cuts
c) Enact Spending Caps to 19%-20%
2. Tax Reform
a) Make “Bush Tax Cuts” Permanent
b) Lower corporate rate and all tax margins
c) Simplify the tax code
d) Eliminate AMT
3. Entitlement Reform
a) Social Security
1) Raise the retirement age
2) Privatization options
3) Change from current to straight inflation increase
b) Food Stamps/Disability Overhaul
1) Fraud and abuse
2) Stricter guidelines
4. Healthcare Reform
a) Repeal Obamacare
b) Tort Reform
c) Create system more like HSA
5. Regulation Reform
a) Repeal strangling regulations – is this possible?
Recently I gave a talk on the Fiscal Cliff — how we got here and where we are going. Since several people have asked, I posted the videos from the talk. For whatever reason, the last 2 minutes ended up a second separate video, but you can view them one after the other. Enjoy!
Consider this: if we go over the fiscal cliff, about $600 Billion will be taken out of the economy in a combination of tax increases and lower spending. This is certain to put a stranglehold on an already weak economy. Obama has had trillion dollar deficits each year of his presidency — the highest deficits of all the presidents in history. Even by reducing the deficit to about $500 Billion by the automatic fiscal cliff triggers, Obama would still be responsible for a deficit that is larger than all of his predecessors. Clearly, spending is at the heart of the problem.
Alan Reynolds over at CATO published a nice piece at National Review Online (NRO). He adeptly points out the fallacy of Obama’s claim that raising taxes on the top 2% will raise a princely sum of revenue to put toward our skyrocketing deficit.
The Treasury Department calculated that
raising the top two personal-income-tax rates — to 36 from 33 percent and to 39.6 from 35 percent on incomes above $250,000 and $377,000, respectively — would raise just $23.1 billion in 2013, barely enough to finance federal spending for two days.
How is this supposed to be a solution? It’s not, but it’s the stuff of which good rhetoric and sound bytes are made. Making the rich “pay their fair share” puts the onus on the wealthy — someone other than the average taxpayer — as a red herring to the hide the fact that our deficit problem is so large, a tax increase isn’t going to make a dent. But the Democrats can’t admit that their tax-and-spend mentality is falling apart.
Yet the real interesting part of the article starts halfway in. Reynolds goes on to make the case for cutting the corporate tax rate, an important point raised in the Simpson-Bowles package that has been all but forgotten. We are reminded that both Obama and Romney have suggested lowering the rates in the past, which are among the highest in first-world countries at 35%. Cutting the rates would be stimulative, as more money becomes readily available to businesses which have been struggling in this economy. It would also serve to entice businesses to relocate here, instead of our businesses continuously seeking lower tax rates outside the US (as they are now). We desperately need the economy to grow — to grow our way out of this slump, instead of trying to tax our way out of it (and putting ourselves back into a recession). Reynolds notes,
the positive impact on business investment, and on multinational decisions to locate new businesses in the U.S. rather than abroad, would be swift and powerful. There is nothing to lose from cutting the corporate tax rate, not even revenue, and the economic gains are likely to be quite astonishing.
Let’s hope for some real tax relief out of the fiscal cliff negotiations. Besides allowing the current tax rates to stay in place — perhaps permanently — so that we can stop being in a state of economic uncertainty, cutting corporate taxes should be a key item on the table.