By Jim Jordan
After an unprecedented spending binge, apologists for big government once again want to raise taxes to reduce the deficit. We've seen this before.
In 1990, Republicans agreed to what liberals call a "balanced" deal— for every $1 in tax increases, Congress would cut $2 of spending. But when the dust settled, taxes and spending both went up.
The real cause of our debt problem is too much wasteful spending. Washington has an alphabet soup of bureaucracies that duplicate each others' work, often with dubious results: 47 job training programs and more than 100 for surface transportation — all funded with your tax dollars.
Is it any wonder we've run $1 trillion deficits the past three years and have a $15 trillion national debt?
Politicians are so addicted to spending, they can't even avoid the temptation to spend savings from relatively minor budget cuts. President Obama's recent plan to cut $100 million of waste within his administration won't actually save money because he's going to spend it elsewhere.
That's deficit relocation, not deficit reduction.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/story/2011-11-13/supercommittee-raise-taxes/51187688/1
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