Now that the future revenue path is pretty clear for the next decade, I took another look at President Obama's 2013 budget, which projects spending and revenue through 2022 on the assumption—a correct one, it turns out—that taxes will only rise on the affluent.
The Center for Responsive Politics compiles data on the 50 top interest groups giving money to Congress. Near the top of the 2012 list are the usual suspects—finance, insurance, real estate, and Big Oil. Near the bottom are casinos and the building materials industry (along with "Women's Issues.")
But guess who's not on the list? Gun rights groups. Not only did such groups not make the list in 2012; they have never made the list. Even if you only look at the 50 interest groups supporting Republicans, the gun rights crowd doesn't make the cut.
In a properly working economy, a booming business would be good for everyone involved in building that business: shareholders, executives, and workers.
In a broken and dysfunctional economy, the shareholders and executives would get richer and richer while the workers lived in poverty.
Washington is in a fiscal panic, yet surprisingly few people are asking an obvious question: Why in the world is the Obama administration proposing to spend $8 trillion on security over the next decade? Included in that giant sum is not just Pentagon spending, but also outlays for intelligence, homeland security, foreign aid, and diplomacy abroad.
If the administration gets its way, security spending would account for a fifth of all government outlays over the next decade. Such spending would be roughly twice as great as all non-mandatory spending through 2022—a category that includes everything from NASA to Pell Grants and national parks.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) is out with a budget plan that would reduce deficits by $4.1 trillion over the next decade and, at first glance, seems to makes a good deal of sense.
Two former Treasury secretaries—Larry Summers and Robert Rubin—are listed as co-authors of the plan, along with Roger Altman, William Daley, John Podesta, Leslie Samuels, Neera Tanden, Antonio Weiss, Michael Ettlinger, Seth Hanlon, and Michael Linden. An impressive brain trust by any measure.
