The Paygo Farce - all a big Democrat confidence game

The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal featured article today addressed the the Democrat confidence game - PAYGO behind which they have tried to hide their excessive spending tracks in the Congress:

"Democrats are committed to ending years of irresponsible budget policies that have produced historic deficits. Instead of compiling trillions of dollars of debt onto our children and grandchildren, we will restore pay-as-you-go budget discipline." -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 12/12/06

Well, as Emily Litella, the half-witted Gilda Radner character on Saturday Night Live, would have put it: "Never mind." Last week Congressional Democrats formally renounced their ballyhooed budget pledge to offset any new tax cuts with other tax increases or spending cuts. We're delighted to see this false promise go, but there's a larger lesson in this failure for the tax and spending battles of 2008.

Senate Democrats gave up on "paygo," as it's called, when they realized they lacked the votes to offset the $50.6 billion cost of protecting more than 20 million middle-class taxpayers from getting whacked by the Alternative Minimum Tax this year. . . . Paygo is now pay gone. We should stress that this is the right decision for the economy and the federal budget. The AMT was never supposed to hit the middle class, and it only does so now because the Democrats who designed it failed to index it for inflation and raised AMT rates under Bill Clinton in 1993 . . . .

But paygo shouldn't be allowed to expire without everyone kicking sand on its grave. That's because it has been nothing but a confidence game from the very start. Paygo doesn't apply to domestic discretionary spending, and it doesn't restrain spending increases under current law in entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid. Its main goals are to make tax cutting all but impossible, while letting Democrats pretend to favor "fiscal discipline," . . . . In fact, the paygo farce has been unfolding all year.

. . . The larger relevance of this episode concerns the 2008 campaign. Hillary Clinton in particular has made paygo a major campaign theme because it makes her sound like a fiscal conservative while helping to justify tax increases. But, lo, guess who was missing on Thursday when the Senate voted 88-5 to ignore paygo on the AMT? None other than the candidate herself, along with Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. To quote another Saturday Night Live character, "How convenient."

Mr. Bush, and especially the GOP Presidential candidates, should be using this paygo collapse to explain to Americans what a charade this Democratic line is. The 2003 tax cuts expire in 2010, and paygo will make them all but impossible to extend. Now's the time to bury paygo for good. . . . [Read More]

See also: Pay-Go: Fiscal Responsibility or Political Cover to Raise Your Taxes?

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