What should Republicans in Congress do right now about the "fiscal cliff"? Everyone has advice, almost none of which squares with reality. Republicans have only two levers of control: the House of Representatives and filibusters in the Senate. Consider the options.
Option 1: Do nothing.
If no new legislation gets passed we hit the so-called "fiscal cliff." That means all "Bush tax cuts" would expire, for rich and non-rich alike. It means other tax cuts and credits added under Obama (payroll tax cuts, child tax credits, etc.) would also expire. The Congressional Budget Office estimates all that at $4,532 billion over the next decade, or almost 11% of all projected federal revenue.
Then there is the spending side of the fiscal cliff, or sequestration. The CBO says sequestration amounts to $492B in military cuts and another $492B in non-defense cuts from the current baseline over the next decade. If these "cuts" are allowed to happen, federal spending would be $43,823B over the next decade. That means sequestration amounts to a 2.2% spending cut, or spending would go up only 55% instead of 58%.
But that's not all. We also have Obama's Medicare cuts, which mean paying doctors less while expecting the same level of care. That's another $245B over the next decade. Now if deficits are your one and only concern, and you actually believe the CBO's projections, the fiscal cliff looks like a good thing. In fact, "doing nothing" is what the CBO calls its "baseline." And deficits in the CBO's baseline are under 3% of GDP (a good thing) by 2014, and under 1% of GDP from 2016 on. Such deficits would be lovely, if true.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
