Balancing the budget

One Seattle paper posed the current mess in Washington as between a $54 billion reconciliation - that falls heavily on students and $70 billion in tax cuts. What a crock. With that kind of question you will always get the wrong answer. There are a couple of things going on here. First, revenue growth is exceeding expense growth at the federal level by healthy margins - in part that is a result of the tax cuts - especially as they relate to capital issues. But wouldn't the questions be better posed by asking Congress to cut back a lot on setasides - pick out the money that was put into projects like bridges to nowhere and we could easily accomplish the revenue goals of reconciliation without cutting into necessary programs or deteriorating our tax structure in relation to the rest of the world.

The url for the cartoon is http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/horsey/viewbydate.asp?id=1288 - I did not hot link it because I think the tradeoff posed in it is what is wrong with the choices we are making at the federal level.