Balancing the Federal Budget

Below is my comment on today’s op-ed in the Post by Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Va) re balancing the federal budget:

Democrats and Republicans want a balanced budget. The average taxpayer pays $1,000 a year in debt service – and gets nothing in return. $200 billion per year goes to bond holders; a third of them are foreigners. These numbers are rapidly increasing. They are unsustainable. Congressman Wolf is right to raise warning flags. A key theme in his op-ed, however, is the need to close corporate tax breaks. That is necessary but not sufficient. Corporate income taxes contribute $300 billion per year to the Treasury. No amount of closing corporate tax breaks will eliminate today’s trillion dollar deficits. Also, Wolf’s willingness to “put everything on the table” is troubling. He is willing to balance the budget through cuts in military and civil service pensions, Medicare, Social Security, Intelligence Community funding and Pell Grants, among others. That is wrong-headed. If Wolf is serious about balancing the budget, he should support an immediate roll-back of the Bush-43 tax cuts. They destroyed the balanced federal budget built by Bill Clinton and a Democratic congress in 1993. The fact that Wolf voted for these tax cuts and continues to believe in them makes hollow his calls for a balanced budget.