Marco Rubio’s budget ideas don’t add up
Do any of them from the GOP?
WASHINGTON Marco Rubios toughest political opponent may be math.
Thats because his economic agenda has a simple arithmetic problem. He wants to balance the budget - in fact, he wants to amend the Constitution to make that mandatory - but at the same time he wants to cut taxes by $4 trillion or so, increase defense spending, and keep antipoverty spending where it is. That doesnt leave a lot of places to find savings. There probably arent any in non-defense discretionary spending things like roads and research when its already at a 40-year low. So youd have to get them all by cutting Social Security and Medicare, and cutting them now. Rubio, though, only wants to reform entitlements for future seniors, not current ones. And that leaves you with big, fat deficits for a good, long while.
This is the same problem Republicans have had for 35 years now. Thats how long theyve been running on deficit-financed tax cuts and fiscal responsibility. So Rubio, whos trying to portray himself as a new kind of Republican, is seizing on the only thing that makes that combination work: saying tax cuts will pay for themselves. Specifically, hes said that the way to balance the budget is with dynamic economic growth, which, of course, his tax cuts are supposed to provide.
Thats saying you can eat your cake and have it too, because eating it will make more of it appear. But anyone who remembers the big deficits that came after Ronald Reagan and George W. Bushs big tax cuts knows thats not the case. Indeed, former Bush adviser Greg Mankiw knew this himself, calling people who said otherwise little more than charlatans and cranks.
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20150416/NEWS02/150419285