Deficit Neutral is Good?

So Obama won’t sign any bill that isn’t “deficit-nuetral”. Max Baucus leads the charge to create a health care bill that fits that description. Unfortunately, that is not the same as fiscally-responsible.

Deficit neutral simply means that Congress has decided to tax us enough to pay for whatever program is in the bill. Normally, we enact new spending programs separate from revenue programs to avoid parliamentary complexities. By combining the two, Congress has found the secret sauce to get by conservatives – deficit-neutrality. Are we stupid? Apparently.

The CBO says that the Baucus bill would reduce the deficit by $81 Billion. Wow! It’s billions in new taxes and we are cheering. If we didn’t enact the bill at all, we could achieve $81 billion in savings and we wouldn’t have to pay billions in taxes to get it. But we don’t get it. According to Beltway Blips, the GOP are giving in and looking for concessions. Time to start writing, emailing, and calling again to remind them that GOP does NOT equal conservative.  We certainly learned that during the Bush years, and maybe they haven’t figured it out yet.

Tax and spend is not new.  It is the foundation of the liberal party.  Spend whatever, but tax to cover.  That is a deficit-neutral strategy.  I don’t want deficit neutral, I want spending-neutral.  If they can give everyone health care and no business, entity or person pays increased taxes to cover it, well, then I might have to go for it.  We all know that’s not possible.

Obama’s promise of deficit-neutrality is nothing more than promising to tax you to cover for every dime of spending he intends to enact.  If he wants to make a promise that we can all live with, make taxes fair, decrease what we pay, and balance the budget.  He won’t, because no new programs can be implemented in a spending-neutral scheme and if he can’t give the people things, they won’t vote for him.