Republicans have tried to justify their debt ceiling crisis by arguing that they’re desperate to reduce the deficit. “We must move towards a balanced budget and insist on genuine accountability for every dollar we spend,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said in prepared remarks last week.
The California Republican added that putting the nation “on a path towards a balanced budget is not only the right place to start, it’s the only place to start.” He went on to argue that the national debt is “the greatest threat to our future.”
The list of problems with his rhetoric — McCarthy has no actual plan; his party has no credibility; the already shrinking deficit isn’t an especially serious problem, etc. — isn’t short. But perhaps the most important detail in the larger conversation is that Republicans are pushing for smaller deficits while simultaneously pushing for larger deficits.
We saw some evidence of this last month, when the new House GOP majority, in their very first bill, voted to increase the deficit by $114 billion. This week, a prominent House Republican sent out this press release on a proposal that would increase the deficit by a far larger amount.
… Congressman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) announced he has joined Congressman Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) and 71 colleagues in reintroducing the TCJA Permanency Act (H.R.976), legislation to make permanent the tax cuts for individuals and small businesses originally enacted as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017. Without Congressional action, 23 different provisions of the 2017 Republican tax law are set to expire after 2025.
As a substantive matter, these Republicans are right about the timeline. Donald Trump’s most notable legislative accomplishment — a massive package of tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations — was structured in such a way as to obscure its true cost. To that end, many of the tax cuts are set to disappear in the coming years, leaving elected…
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