To avoid the spending cuts required under sequestration, both the White House and Senate Democrats indicated they will continue to push over the next year for tax increases on the wealthy in exchange for undoing the defense spending cuts required under current law.
“We will achieve the more than $2 trillion in deficit reduction we agreed to in August,” Reid wrote yesterday in USA Today. “Without a balanced plan to reduce the deficit by at least as much, I will oppose any efforts to change it.” Reid also blasted Republicans for trying “to to end Medicare as we know it.”
Paralleling Reid’s rhetoric of demanded tax hikes and Medicare fear-mongering, Jay Carney, President Obama’s White House Press Secretary, indicated what an election year budget battle over how to avoid the sequestration cuts might look like.
Republicans must “ask the very wealthiest Americans, millionaires and billionaires, to pay just a little bit extra so that we can achieve the kind of deficit reduction and long term debt control that we need,” Carney said yesterday. He also charged with Republicans with offering a plan in which “the burden falls on senior citizens, who see their Medicare bills skyrocket, and then families with children who are disabled and others who are vulnerable in our society.”
Carney made clear that only these tax increases can avert “the defense cuts [under sequestration that] are much deeper than we think are wise . . . Short of that willingness, it’s hard to see how we get to an answer.”
As Carney and Reid both indicated tax increases as the only path to the “long term debt control that we need,” it bears noting what spending “cuts” Democrats put on the table. Answer: not much.
To quote Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who served on the Supercommittee: “Incidentally, when you say ‘cuts,’ — it was slowing the rate of growth,” he explained yesterday morning. “It was a slowing of the rate at which [spending] is growing.”
