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The House and Senate budget conference committee that was formed as part of the deal that ended the federal government shutdown and raised the debt ceiling is unlikely to come to any “grand bargain” that dramatically reduces the deficit or increases public investments. This is because, as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan reiterated this week, Congressional Republicans will oppose any proposal that includes new revenue.
“Taking more from hardworking families just isn’t the answer. I know my Republican colleagues feel the same way,” Ryan said during a meeting of the conference committee on Wednesday. “So I want to say this from the get-go: If this conference becomes an argument about taxes, we’re not going to get anywhere. The way to raise revenue is to grow the economy.”
There can be no reasonable “grand bargain,” which is usually interpreted to mean a deal including cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare, if Congressional Republicans continue to block any and all revenue increases. The U.S. collects lower taxes as a percentage of its economy, than any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations other than Mexico and Chile. Our current federal tax system is projected to collect revenue equal to 18.5 percent of our economy a decade from now. As we have pointed out before, in only a handful of years over the past three decades has federal spending been this low.
There are still useful things the committee might do, in theory, like changing the way sequestration affects certain programs. But the overall level of federal spending may be stuck at its current austere level, which has already done much damage to the economy.
Even the apparent glimmers of interest in revenue among Republicans on the conference committee are misleading. Rep. Tom Cole, for example, raised the possibility of “raising revenue” by enacting a tax amnesty for repatriated offshore profits like the one that was enacted in 2004. The non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation has already concluded that allowing American corporations to officially bring to the U.S. their offshore profits (many of which are already being invested in the U.S.) would raise revenue for a few years and then lose revenue as companies are encouraged to shift even more profits offshore and wait for the next tax amnesty.
Committees can talk around the issue all they want, but there is simply no getting around the need for increased revenue.
