Recently in Budget and Deficits Category

Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) has joined forces with a broad coalition of organizations called Rebuild and Renew America Now (RRAN) to promote a simple message: Congress has a whole lot of options to raise revenue to pay for health care reform and other initiatives without unfairly impacting low- or middle-income people and without harming the economy.

These progressive revenue options include both the tax changes included in President Obama's fiscal year 2010 budget proposals as well as additional options formulated in a recent report by CTJ and endorsed by Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). (See CTJ's report on the President's tax proposals and CTJ's report on additional revenue options to fund health care reform.)

RRAN is a coalition that engaged in education, communications and lobbying efforts in support of the President's budget and other progressive initiatives earlier this year and has mobilized advocates and activists all over the country. Many of the organizations involved are usually focused on particular public services or progressive reforms, but have realized that all public services and reforms are in danger if Congress can't bring itself to raise the revenue needed to pay for them.

RRAN has invited organizations (both national organizations and state organizations) to sign onto its two-page statement of principles for this new campaign for progressive revenue options. Signing does not commit an organization to do anything (although all are also encouraged to become active in RRAN's activities) but simply states support for efforts to pay for initiatives in progressive ways. Anyone who is authorized to sign on behalf of an organization can visit the website of the Coalition on Human Needs (CHN) or simply click here.

The statement lists three broad principles to guide Congress's efforts to find revenue:

1. Adequacy. The federal tax system should raise sufficient revenue over time to meet our shared priorities and invest in our common future.

2. Fairness. Tax preferences that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy and corporations should be eliminated, and individuals and businesses should contribute their fair share of taxes, based on ability to pay.

3. Responsibility. We should not saddle future generations with unsustainable levels of debt.

The statement also lists examples of the kinds of tax policies RRAN supports:

• raising revenues from upper-income households;
• assessing a significant tax on large estates;
• reducing abuses among corporations and individuals who shelter income in offshore tax evasion or avoidance schemes;
• closing financial industry, oil and gas, and other inefficient corporate loopholes; and
• reducing tax preferences for unearned as opposed to earned income.

For more information in the coming days, visit RRAN's website: www.rebuildandrenew.org

On May 11, the Treasury Department released its "Green Book" containing new details of the tax changes included in the President's fiscal year 2010 budget proposal. In addition to extending the Bush tax cuts for all but the richest Americans and making permanent many of the tax cuts in the recently enacted economic recovery act, the President would also make many changes that would raise revenue by closing loopholes, blocking tax avoidance schemes and making the tax code more progressive.

A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice examines and describes the significant revenue-raising provisions that are sure to be debated fiercely in the months to come.

Read the report.

Approval Marks a Major Step Towards Enacting President's Agenda

On Wednesday, both the House and Senate approved a Congressional budget resolution for fiscal year 2010 that paves the way for several of the President's major initiatives. The resolution allows Congress to make new investments in education and clean energy and puts in place procedures that will make it easier for Congress to enact comprehensive health care reform. It also allows Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts for all but the richest Americans.

The budget resolution allows for about $3.5 trillion in federal spending in fiscal year 2010 and includes important tax and spending provisions related to years after that. It is not a law and is not binding, but puts in place caps on the spending that Congress appropriates each year, sets targets for tax and spending changes and includes certain procedural changes that make it more likely Congress will meet these goals.

Tax Cuts Extended for All but the Rich

For example, the budget resolution allows Congress to reduce revenues by a certain amount by extending the Bush income tax cuts. It is understood that the amount of revenue-reduction allowed would be sufficient to extend the Bush tax cuts for those with incomes below $250,000. It also allows for Congress to reduce revenues by preventing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) from expanding as it is scheduled to under current law. Similarly, it allows Congress to extend the estate tax rules in effect in 2009 instead of allowing the estate tax to revert to the rules put in place during the Clinton years, before Bush's cuts in the estate tax were enacted.

The resolution allows for Congress to enact these tax cuts without finding new revenue to pay for them -- on one condition, which is that Congress enacts a statutory pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rule that will (in theory) prevent Congress from enacting any more legislation that will increase the deficit. That means that any additional tax cuts (say, an extension of the Making Work Pay Credit that was enacted for two years as part of the economic stimulus package) would have to be combined with revenue-raising provisions to offset the costs.

Predictably, allies of former President George W. Bush have expressed horror that Democratic leaders and President Obama wish to extend the Bush tax cuts for 97.5 percent of Americans rather than 100 percent. The Democrats and the President would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for singles with incomes over $200,000 and married couples with incomes over $250,000 (which make up roughly the richest 2.5 percent of taxpayers).

For their part, House Republicans used the budget debate to demonstrate to the public just how lopsided the tax code would be if their goals were ever realized and just how much government would have to shrink because of the revenue losses that would result. Earlier this month, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee presented his tax and spending plan which would cut and privatize Medicare, convert Medicaid into limited block grants to states, repeal the recently enacted economic stimulus law and deeply cut the relatively small amount of government spending devoted to non-military, non-mandatory programs.

Citizens for Tax Justice published a report concluding that under this GOP plan, over a third of taxpayers, mostly low- and middle-income families, would pay more in taxes than they would under the House Democratic plan in 2010, while the richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $75,000 less, on average.

Final Budget Leaves Out the Senate's Outrageous Estate Tax Cut

Progressives scored a victory when Democratic leaders agreed to exclude from the final budget an amendment adopted by the Senate during its budget debate on April 2 which would slash the estate tax to benefit multi-millionaires. Before the Senate approved this amendment, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "It is so stunning, so outrageous that some would choose this hour of national crisis to push for an amendment to slash the estate tax for the super wealthy." His common sense view carried the day as negotiators hammered out the final resolution.

The tax cuts enacted under President Bush in 2001 scheduled a gradual repeal of the estate tax, with the amount of assets exempted from the tax gradually increasing over a decade and the tax rate on estates gradually dropping until the estate tax would disappear entirely in 2010. Like almost all of the Bush tax cuts, this cut in the estate tax expires at the end of 2010, meaning that rules scheduled under President Clinton would come back into effect in 2011.

The budget resolutions passed out of the House and Senate budget committees in March both assumed that the estate tax rules in place in 2009 would be made permanent, meaning the Bush estate tax cut would be partially made permanent but the estate tax would not disappear entirely in 2010. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report finding that about 99.7 percent of estates would be untouched by the tax under this proposal.

Incredibly, 51 Senators voted in favor of the amendment offered by Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) to cut the estate tax even more than this. The 2009 estate tax rules exempt the first $7 million of assets passed on by a married couple (as well as assets they leave to charity) and tax the rest at a rate of 45 percent. The Kyl-Lincoln amendment called for a $10 million exemption for married couples and a 35 percent rate.

Taking Steps Towards Enacting the President's Priorities

Progressives scored another victory in the area of health care. House and Senate leaders decided to include in the final budget resolution a mechanism known as "reconciliation" which will allow the Senate to enact health care reform and higher education loan changes with a simple majority vote.

The practice of filibustering legislation in the Senate has, over the years, turned into a default rule that three fifths the Senate's members must agree to pass a bill. This means that legislation supported by Senators representing a majority of Americans is often blocked. Many advocates fear that this is exactly what could happen to health care reform and many other of the President's important initiatives.

Reconciliation is a way around this obstacle. A budget resolution can include reconciliation instructions specifying that committees will pass legislation that can then pass the full House and Senate under a streamlined process. In the Senate, that streamlined process means that the bill can be passed with just 51 votes.

The particular version of reconciliation included in this budget is optional, meaning Democratic leaders will resort to using it only if bipartisan consensus proves elusive.

Several Republican Senators, and some Democratic Senators, have taken the view that majority rule is undemocratic, and have called reconciliation a partisan ploy to "ram through" the President's agenda. (The idea of the Senate moving too quickly is a little hard for any Hill observer to understand.) More importantly, enacting health care reform will require Congress to raise a great deal of revenue, and finding a large bipartisan majority for that might be a challenge.

Finally, some have complained that reconciliation is only to be used for deficit-reduction, but this is entirely unconvincing because these are largely the same members who voted in favor of reconciliation bills during the Bush years that actually increased the deficit by cutting taxes.

The U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate both approved budget resolutions on April 2. The Coalition on Human Needs is asking people who care about reforming health care, improving education and reducing poverty to thank their members of the House and Senate if they voted in favor of the budget resolutions that passed. (The House passed its budget by a vote of 233-196, and the Senate passed its version by 55-43.)

Click here to see how your Representative and Senators voted. If any of them voted in favor, click here to send them a note thanking them.

The basic thrust of many of the tax policies embodied in the budget resolutions mirror the President's proposals. Both resolutions assume the extension of the Bush income tax cuts for everyone except taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 (or $250,000 for married couples). Taxpayers above these thresholds are affected by the top two income tax rates, which would revert to 36 and 39.6 percent. Both resolutions would extend the "AMT patch," a measure that increases the exemptions from the Alternative Minimum Tax to ensure that most taxpayers are not affected by it.

On certain key issues (like the estate tax) the Senate made some poor choices that will hopefully not be reflected in the final budget resolution the House and Senate will have to approve sometime after they return from their recess on April 20. For more details, see last week's Digest articles on the federal budget.

The U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate both approved budget resolutions on Thursday that move Congress a step closer to enacting President Obama's agenda, without being quite as bold or explicit as the budget outline released by the President in late February. Both resolutions would spend about $3.5 trillion in 2010 and include non-binding, but important, provisions affecting spending and revenues in years after that. As lawmakers from both chambers leave Washington for their spring recess, behind-the-scenes negotiations will likely pave the way for a House-Senate conference to take place upon their return to iron out the differences between the two resolutions. On some key issues like estate tax and health care, the House has made wiser choices that will hopefully be maintained in the final budget resolution.

The basic thrust of many of the tax policies embodied in the budget resolutions mirror the President's proposals. Both assume the extension of the Bush income tax cuts for everyone except taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 (or $250,000 for married couples). Taxpayers above these thresholds are affected by the top two income tax rates, which would revert to 36 and 39.6 percent. Both resolutions would extend the "AMT patch," a measure that increases the exemptions from the Alternative Minimum Tax to ensure that most taxpayers are not affected by it. (The chambers differ on the extent to which the costs of the AMT patch will have to be offset with revenue-raising measures in the future.)

The resolutions do not follow the President's proposals on certain issues. For example, President Obama proposed that the income tax cuts aimed at working families and included in the recently-enacted stimulus bill be made permanent. The resolutions would make some of these permanent, like the expansion in the child tax credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit for higher education.

But they would not make permanent the Making Work Pay Credit, one of Obama's signature tax policies. Neither do they include any specific language to create a "cap and trade" program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which, in the President's proposal, would produce the revenue needed to offset the costs of the Making Work Pay Credit and other energy initiatives.

Similarly, the resolutions do not include language laying out how Congress will pay for health care reform. (The President's budget outline included a reduction in the benefits of itemized deductions for the rich to partially fund health care reform.)

None of this means that Congress will not act on these proposals of the President's. The resolution includes language allowing for deficit-neutral legislation in these areas without specifying how money will be spent or how it will be raised.

Congress's next important test involves settling the differences between the House and Senate resolutions. When it comes to revenues raised to pay for health care or revenues raised from the estate tax, hopefully the choices made by the House will be maintained in the final budget resolution. See the following Digest articles for more.

Estate Tax: Senate Approves a Break for Millionaires that Leader Reid Calls "So Stunning, So Outrageous"

Reconciliation for Health Care Reform: House Moves to Stop Senators' Obstruction of Measures with Majority Support

House GOP's Alternative Budget: Poor Pay More, Rich Pay Less, Stimulus Repealed and Government Shrinks

The tax cuts enacted under President Bush in 2001 scheduled a gradual repeal of the estate tax, with the amount of assets exempted from the tax gradually increasing over a decade and the tax rate on estates gradually dropping until the estate tax would disappear entirely in 2010. Like almost all of the Bush tax cuts, this cut in the estate tax expires at the end of 2010, meaning that rules scheduled under President Clinton would come back into effect in 2011.

The budget resolutions passed out of the House and Senate budget committees last week both assumed that the estate tax rules in place in 2009 would be made permanent, meaning the Bush estate tax cut would be partially made permanent but the estate tax would not disappear entirely. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report this week finding that about 99.7 percent of estates would be untouched by the tax under this proposal.

Incredibly, 51 Senators voted to approve an amendment offered by Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) to cut the estate tax even more than this. The 2009 estate tax rules exempt the first $7 million of assets passed on by a married couple (as well as assets they leave to charity) and tax the rest at a rate of 45 percent. The Kyl-Lincoln amendment puts the Senate on record as supporting a $10 million exemption for married couples and a 35 percent rate.

Before the Senate approved this amendment, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "It is so stunning, so outrageous that some would choose this hour of national crisis to push for an amendment to slash the estate tax for the super wealthy."

Remarkably, both the Republican Senators and the "moderate" Democratic Senators who voted for this expanded break for families with millions of dollars to pass on to their heirs were largely the same Senators who claim to be concerned about budget deficits and the costs of the President's proposals to help working families.

The actual consequence of the amendment is unclear for several reasons. First, the amendment was written to be "deficit-neutral," meaning that if Congress wants to pass actual legislation to cut the estate tax, they would have to find a way to raise enough revenue to replace those billions lost. Some of the Senators who voted for the amendment would oppose a cut in the estate tax if it is deficit-financed (which any estate tax cut is likely to be). Second, the Senate then adopted (by a vote of 56 to 43) a confusing amendment creating a point of order AGAINST any estate tax cut if the Senate did not also provide some new tax cut, costing the same amount of money, for people earning less than $100,000. Whether that condition could be met is an open question.

Sorting through this confusing jumble of stated intentions and caveats will hopefully become unnecessary. The conferees crafting the final budget resolution should leave out the Senate's ludicrous cut in the estate tax.

Unlike the Senate budget resolution, the House resolution includes "reconciliation" instructions that would protect a bill from the filibuster that can thwart legislation in the Senate even if it has majority support. It is understood that the reconciliation procedure would be used to enact health care reform.

Opponents of the President's agenda have been surprisingly effective at casting as unfair the procedure that would allow legislation to be enacted by a majority vote in both chambers. The media has in many cases uncritically quoted lawmakers who feel it would be partisan and divisive to allow the Senate to approve a bill with only 59 out of 100 members voting in favor.

Some have complained that reconciliation is only to be used for deficit-reduction, but these are largely the same members who voted in favor of reconciliation bills during the Bush years that actually increased the deficit by cutting taxes. Even putting that aside, it's not clear that the original purpose of reconciliation is any more important than the original purpose of the Senate filibuster, which was originally used only on rare occasions but has turned into a 60-vote requirement to pass any bill introduced in the Senate.

It's true that there are rules limiting what sorts of measures can be enacted through the reconciliation process. (Provisions that have no quantifiable budget impact in the next few years may be impossible to pass through reconciliation.) But the limits imposed by a potential filibuster may be greater. Whether health care reform happens at all hinges on whether or not Congress can raise the revenue to pay for it. Hopefully, bipartisan agreement can be found on how to do that. But Congressional leaders would be smart to leave themselves the option of reconciliation in case such consensus proves elusive.

When anti-tax activists and lawmakers complain that Congress and the President are pursuing policies that will cause taxes to be too high, the first question anyone should ask is: Compared to what? What exactly is the alternative to allowing the Bush tax cuts to end (at least for the rich) and finding new ways to raise revenue?

This week the House GOP showed us what the alternative is and it's frightening. On Wednesday, the ranking Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives' Budget Committee, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), released a budget plan which he argues is a more fiscally responsible alternative to the budget outline proposed by President Obama and the similar budget resolutions approved by both chambers last night. His proposal is apparently an update of the plan that House GOP leaders introduced last week and is different in some key respects.

The revised House GOP budget plan would move towards cutting and privatizing Medicare, convert Medicaid into limited block grants to states, and even cut Social Security benefits for some retirees. The plan would deeply cut the relatively small amount of government spending devoted to non-military, non-mandatory programs by refusing to adjust the budgets of these programs for inflation and population growth for five years. The House GOP plan would repeal the recently enacted economic stimulus law (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or ARRA) a year before its expiration at the end of 2010.

A report from Citizens for Tax Justice compares the income tax proposals in the House GOP plan to the income tax proposals in the House Democratic plan in 2010, and finds that:

• Over a third of taxpayers, mostly low- and middle-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the House Democratic plan in 2010.
• The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $75,000 less, on average, in income taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the Democratic plan in 2010.
• The income tax proposals in the House GOP plan, which is presented as a fiscally responsible alternative to the Democratic plan, would cost over $225 billion more than the Democratic plan's income tax policies in 2010 alone.

Read the report.

Yesterday, the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives released the outlines of a tax and spending plan that they argue is a more fiscally responsible alternative to the budget outline proposed by President Obama and the similar budget resolutions working their way through the House and Senate.

A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice compares the income tax proposals in the House GOP plan to the income tax proposals in the President's plan and finds that:

• Over a fourth of taxpayers, mostly low-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the President's plan.
• The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $100,000 less, on average, under the House GOP plan than they would under the President's plan.
• The income tax proposals in the House GOP plan, which is presented as a fiscally responsible alternative to the President's plan, would cost over $300 billion more than the Obama income tax cuts in 2011 alone.

Read the report.

This week, Citizens for Tax Justice updated its recent report on the tax proposals in the President's budget outline to include estimates of the proposals' impacts on different income groups in every state. The new state figures examine the proposed cuts compared to current law and also compared to the baseline that the Obama administration uses in presenting its budget figures. The figures show that, whichever baseline is used, the vast majority of families in every state will get a significant tax break.

Read the report. (State-by-state figures are in the final appendix.

Citizens for Tax Justice called uponPresident Obama this week to stand by his message of transparency by finally making "tax expenditure" performance reviews a regular part of the OMB's evaluations of government effectiveness.

Simply put, tax expenditures differ from the rest of the tax code in that they focus on encouraging a specific activity or rewarding a particular group of people, rather than on trying to improve the efficiency, simplicity, or fairness of our tax system.Since tax expenditures are usually enacted with primarily non-tax goals in mind (e.g. encouraging investment, encouraging research and development, encouraging home ownership, etc.) it is important that the government make an effort to gauge their effectiveness in achieving those goals.

But despite calls from the GAO, past Congresses, and outside experts in favor of subjecting tax expenditures to regular performance reviews, the most comprehensive performance measure currently in place, the OMB's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), continues to focus narrowly on only traditional spending programs.

Encouragingly, language in the President's recently released budget blueprint suggests that a more comprehensive approach for evaluating the government's performance will be used under the Obama Administration (see. pp.39).It's hard to see how anything approaching true comprehensiveness could ignore the hundreds of billions of dollars the government directs toward programs administered via the tax code.Hopefully, the brief language addressing performance reviews that was included in this blueprint is the first signal that an end is coming to the free-ride thus far enjoyed by tax expenditures.

Read the full statement from CTJ

On February 26, President Obama sent to Congress the blueprint for what could be one of the most progressive federal budgets in generations. The budget calls for national health care reform, expanded education funding, a program to reduce global warming, and several improvements in human needs programs. As a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice explains, it would make the tax code considerably more progressive, and close a number of egregious tax loopholes.

There is, however, a flaw in the budget proposal: It does not raise enough revenue to pay for public services. Instead, its net effect is to cut taxes dramatically.

Opponents of the President have attempted to argue that the budget proposal calls for tax increases that could sink the economy, but this complaint is plainly unfounded. President Bush and his allies in Congress were adamant that lower taxes would lead to an explosion of prosperity, and they enacted tax cuts in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006. Some allies of the former President argue that Congress is now insufficiently focused on tax cuts, but this view seems bizarre and incredible given the sad economic facts all around us.

Indeed, one might reasonably conclude that we could safely allow most of the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of 2010, as they are scheduled to under current law, without any concern about how this will impact the economy. But President Obama actually proposes to keep most of the Bush tax cuts. Obama's largest proposed tax cut is to re-enact 80 percent of the Bush tax cuts that are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. Most of this reflects re-enacting the Bush income tax cuts for married couples with incomes below $250,000 and others with incomes below $200,000 (or put another way, for about 98 percent of taxpayers), and permanently reducing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). In addition, Obama proposes to re-enact close to half of the Bush estate tax cut.

On top of re-enacting most of the Bush tax cuts, the Obama budget includes a number of additional tax cuts for families and individuals. (These would be extensions of temporary tax cuts included in the recently passed stimulus law.) It also proposes some questionable business tax cuts.

Partially offsetting its tax-cut proposals, the Obama budget proposes some significant revenue-raising provisions. These include a cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions, a limit on the benefits of itemized deductions for high-bracket taxpayers, and a number of corporate and high-income loophole-closing measures.

Read the Report

Special Alert about President Obama's Budget Proposal from Our Friends at the Coalition on Human Needs:

• Learn about this transformational budget during a FREE webinar this Thursday, March 5 at 2pm eastern time (more details below)
• Organizations that wish to support and build upon President Obama's priorities please SIGN a statement online. Read statement here.

FREE Webinar:

President Obama's Budget:
The Path to Rebuild and Renew America Now

When:

Thursday, March 5, 2:00 - 3:00 p.m. eastern time

Register: www.bostonconferencing.net/chn

(Once registered you will receive instructions on how to log in, and explanatory budget materials via email. To participate, you need to be at a computer.)

This webinar will show how the President's budget would invest in health care, renewable energy, education, and more, laying a new foundation for growth that benefits us all. The budget makes an important - make that historic - down payment on renewing opportunities for Americans to join the middle class and be protected from poverty. The webinar will describe the transformational choices in the budget - a long-term plan to pay for the investments we need by raising revenues from those who can afford to pay and by cutting waste in the military and elsewhere. And it will describe a new campaign to support the President's responsible budget priorities - a campaign that needs your help.

Presenters:

• Human Needs Choices in the Budget:
  Deborah Weinstein, Executive Director, Coalition on Human Needs
• Environmental Priorities:
  Ivan Frishberg, Political Director, Environment America
• The Campaign - Rebuild and Renew America Now:
  Alan Charney, Program Director, USAction
• Donald W. Mathis, Moderator, President and CEO, Community Action Partnership

There will be time for questions!

This webinar is co-sponsored by organizations including the Coalition on Human Needs, ACORN, AFSCME, Center for Law and Social Policy, Citizens for Tax Justice, Community Action Partnership, Environment America, Food Research and Action Center, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Health Care for America Now, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, National Association of Social Workers, National Immigration Forum, National Women's Law Center, NETWORK: a National Catholic Social Justice Lobby, Public Education Network, RESULTS, United States Students Association, USAction, Wider Opportunities for Women, and YWCA USA (list in formation).

Revised March 4, 2009

On Thursday, President Obama sent his budget blueprint to Congress. While many of the details remain to be seen, it's the most progressive budget we've seen in years. It's also a more honest budget than the last administration ever proposed. For example, it doesn't pretend that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will expand its reach to tens of millions of additional taxpayers (which Congress never allows), and it includes the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars instead of pretending that they will end this year.

It goes a long way towards making the tax system fairer and more progressive. The tax portion of the budget would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for the very rich and includes revenue-raising provisions that are progressive, environmentally friendly and which, in some cases, would make the tax code simpler.

But the budget blueprint does muddle the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent of individual taxpayers by using a baseline that assumes the Bush tax cuts have already been made permanent, when in reality they are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. (In other words, the Obama administration is using a baseline that assumes John McCain won the presidential election and his allies swept both chambers of Congress and were able to enact his tax policies!)

Continuing the Bush tax breaks for 98 percent of taxpayers and providing AMT relief will cost $2.6 trillion over the 10-year budget period. That's a steep price to pay for tax cuts that have not delivered their promised benefits. As the budget moves through Congress, we hope that the goal of long-term deficit reduction will prevail and the Bush tax breaks will be reduced even more. This could mean, for example, further raising the rates on capital gains and scaling back the cut in the estate tax. These changes would help move us towards the day when the government actually collects enough revenue to pay for the services it provides.

In addition to extending a lot of the Bush tax cuts and providing AMT relief, the President's budget would also provide around $770 billion in additional tax breaks targeted to working class people, plus over $70 billion in tax cuts for business. These are offset with several revenue-raising provisions, including a "cap and trade" program to limit carbon emissions, cleaning up the international tax system and eliminating loopholes for energy companies and other corporations.

These provisions are all included in the tax portion of the budget proposal. Other parts of the proposal include other revenue-raisers. For example, the budget includes a new provision that would limit the benefit of itemized deductions so that they could not reduce taxes by more than 28 percent (instead of, say, 35 percent for people rich enough to be affected by the 35 percent income tax rate). This provision would raise revenue to offset new health care spending.

This budget may not be perfect, but it does take several steps to find revenue to invest in our future and support working class families.

Next week, CTJ will provide a more detailed analysis of the President's budget and its tax provisions.

The President's Fiscal Responsibility Summit

Expect to see some drama next week around the federal budget. First, on Monday, President Obama will convene a "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" with Congressional leaders and others to "to send a signal that we are serious" about the long-term deficits faced by the federal government, focusing on entitlement programs. Obama has been sending signals that he is open to any and all ideas about how to get the federal budget back under control once our economy is back on track. Which is alarming, because a lot of ideas floating around out there are incredibly bad.

For one thing, the supporters of the Bush tax cuts still fail to acknowledge that those tax cuts account for about half of the federal debt piled up by the Bush administration before the financial crisis. Pretty much all of the Republican leaders in Congress claim to be deeply concerned about the deficit, but none have waivered in their commitment to the policies that have created much of it.

Another problem is the focus on entitlements. Medicare faces a crisis, which is the crisis of exploding health care costs that we can only contain by reforming the entire health care system. Exploding health care costs are, many analysts have concluded, the single largest cause of long-term federal budget deficits.

But several right-wing policy advocates have made a cottage industry out of claiming that Social Security must be slashed in order to save America. The most notorious is Peter Peterson, the trillionaire who has set up a foundation to promote his version of "fiscal responsibility" and who apparently has been invited to the summit. CTJ director Robert McIntyre lambasted Peterson back in 1994 in a column in the American Prospect, saying, "Along with tax cuts for the rich, he explicitly endorses tax increases for the poor and the middle class as well as sharp reductions in what average families receive from the government."

McIntyre's criticism is mild compared to the assessment progressives give Peterson today. "Peterson, who made his fortune on Wall Street," writes Robert Borosage, "never raised a word about the dangers of hyper-leveraged finance houses gambling other people's money. He never expressed qualms about the leveraged buyout artists who were using debt finance to rip apart companies. He didn't fund an all-out effort to stop Bush from raiding the Social Security surplus to pay for tax cuts for the rich. But now he wants folks headed into retirement who have already prepaid a surplus of $2.5 trillion to cover their Social Security retirements to take a cut or work a few years longer to cover the money squandered on bailing out banks, wars of choice abroad and tax cuts for the few."

The President's Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Proposal

The drama won't end at the President's Fiscal Responsibility Summit. The President is also expected to release the outlines of his budget proposal next week, and it could contain some very important tax proposals. During his presidential campaign, Obama proposed to extend the Bush tax cuts (which mostly expire at the end of 2010) for all taxpayers except those with incomes above $200,000 (or $250,000 for married couples). CTJ calculated that this would essentially mean that the Bush tax cuts are extended for all but the richest 2.5 percent of taxpayers. It would also cost well over a hundred billion dollars a year, and that's before you add the cost of Obama's promised reform of the Alternative Minimum Tax or his other tax proposals. Meanwhile, he also pledged to repeal the Bush tax cut early for those taxpayers with income above the $200,000/$250,000 threshold, but he has hedged on that promise in recent months.

Obama also campaigned on promises to close some tax loopholes (like the carried interest loophole and loopholes enjoyed by the oil and gas industry) and clean up other parts of the tax code. It will be interesting to see what components of his campaign promises are included in his budget proposal.

Interestingly, the administration has stated that it will not engage in the same gimmicks used by the previous administration to conceal the true size of the budget deficit. For example, the Bush administration always assumed that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) would be allowed to extend its reach to tens of millions of additional taxpayers, which of course made the budget appear more balanced than it truly was, even though everyone knew that Congress would enact a "patch" every year to prevent the AMT from expanding its reach. So this budget process may be more transparent than any we've seen in years.