Republicans Give a Thumbs-Up to Joint Committee Tax Increases

As the Joint Committee debates how it will “save” a paltry $1.2 billion dollars from ten years of federal budgets that will amount to at least $30 trillion, several Republicans have already announced they’re willing to talk about tax hikes.

First, the good news. Several Republican Senators asked the Joint Committee to include lower tax rates and ensure that net taxes would not increase with it submits its final recommendations to Congress. That “hold the line” mentality didn’t last long, though. One of the signatories to that letter, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, said it really didn’t matter and that he, personally, would accept tax increases.

However, Coburn, speaking to a scrum of reporters Monday evening, dismissed the letter — spearheaded by Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) — as “aspirational” and “meaningless.”

“I’m out there pretty bold on what I believe in terms of what we ought to tackle,” Coburn said. “And I’m willing to take some tax increases.”

And he’s not merely referring to higher “revenue,” which many Republicans have signaled a willingness to accept.

That last link, by the way, refers to a statement by Speaker John Boehner, who said there was “room for revenues” but wouldn’t go so far as to specifically say that would mean tax hikes.

Understand what we’re talking about here. The Super Committee’s recommendation will slice at least $1.2 trillion from federal budgets over the next ten years. Per year, that amounts to a minimum “cut” of 120 billion to budgets that haven’t been less than $3.1 trillion since 2008. We don’t know how large the last two budgets were because the Senate hasn’t passed a budget in well over 900 days, but if we assume that it does at some point in the future, there is almost no chance it will be smaller than $3 trillion. The yearly “cuts” over which the Joint Committee continues to agonize would amount to less than 4 percent of each budget.

By comparison, the average increase per year of the budgets from 2001 to 2011 was 6.1 percent. The average budget increase under President Obama for two years was 9.6 percent. Now, the Joint Committee’s cuts are not cuts to the budget itself, but to the budget baseline, which always goes up. Even if we get these 4 percent cuts, we still face increasing budgets, if they continue to rise as they have in the past.

Now, such a small cut can have a profound effect, but only if the economy grows at a respectable rate. Tax increases or, to borrow Speak Boehner’s term “revenue” increases, do not promote the growth we need. We have seen over the past several years how tax hikes and constant meddling with the tax system have stunted our economic recovery and scared business owners and would-be investors away.

If we want to get out deficit under control, we have to get serious about government spending. No tax increase will get us where we need to go if we can’t discipline ourselves to live within our national means. Republicans ought to remember that.