John Boehner repeats that spin-message constantly. If we turned it into a drinking game based on him saying "spending problem", we'd all get three or four snorts every day.
Orange John has a child-like belief that if he repeats a lie often enough, it'll somehow become the truth (or at least close enough to truthiness to convince the Fox-bots and the Tea Baggers). The Weeper of the House would have us believe that we have plenty of revenue, we're swimmin' in it, and that the real cause of our budget deficit is our "spending problem" (take a drink) -- we're just spoiled children who refuse to live within our means.
Oh John, you're always so full of shit! Our budget deficit is a Republican monster created by Republican's pet policies, designed to benefit certain predictable Republican constituents. What do all real Republicans really like? Military spending and tax cuts. And in the past 10-12 years, we've had 'em in spades!
We've had two lengthy and unnecessary wars. They are Republican spending programs. Our current Defense budget is $700 billion, almost all of it discretionary and the large majority of it spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. The sequester and our Afghan withdrawal will bring it down significantly, but our military budget still exceeds the budgets of the next ten highest nations combined. It bears no relationship to any actual threat level. Plenty of room to trim spending in the DOD, but most Republicans simply will not hear of it.
In 2001, George W. Bush pushed through a "temporary" ten-year package of income tax cuts. We haven't had a balanced budget since. Even with the recent slight tax increase on the top 1% of earners ("Obama's revenue"), the Bush cuts continue to cost us $350-$360 billion a year in lost revenue compared to the old rates.
Our current annual budget deficit -- which is somehow all Obama's fault, right? -- is about $1 trillion. We have $700 billion in annual military spending thanks mainly to the GOP's two wars. And we have $350 billion less in annual tax revenue thanks to the GOP's tax cuts. Do the math. (An over-simplification, I know, but not much of one.)
And as the NY Times pointed out a couple days ago, tax giveaways cost the government more than anything. Our combined tax deductions, credits, subsidies, etc. are worth $1.1 trillion a year -- more than Medicare and Medicaid, more than Social Security, more than Defense (the top 3 government outlays).
Included in that figure is the value of the very popular home mortgage interest deduction. Some say it should be eliminated. If it were (and it won't be), the impact would be insignificant. According to the OMB, the lost tax revenue via the mortgage interest deduction runs $75-$100 billion a year, a mere drop in the bucket. Maybe a little tightening of the deduction for high-value homes or high incomes, but that's about it.
The vast majority of the tax breaks are enjoyed by corporations, which is exactly the way Republicans like it. In our current federal budget, only 9.5% of all revenue comes from corporate income tax, versus 47% of revenue from personal income tax.
Republicans love to bitch about our 35% corporate income tax rate, "the highest in the world." Yet the average corporation pays an effective average rate of 10-12%, and many pay 0% or even less.
The industries receiving the most in tax subsidies and other giveaways are energy and utilities, banking and financial, telecommunications, and oil and gas.
In 2010, thirty U.S. corporations paid less than 0% in federal income tax via rebates, refunds and subsidies. These 30 included GE, NiSource (Columbia Gas), AEP, Duke Energy, Verizon, DuPont, Boeing, Wells Fargo and Honeywell. The 30 companies reported a total of $160.3 billion in profits and received $10.7 billion in total tax refunds -- an average effective rate of -6.7%.
We have a ton of work to do in this area.
But John Boehner says it's just a spending problem? And Paul Ryan wants to fix our budget deficit by whacking Granny's Medicare. WTF??
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