Study: Deficit 'Hawks' Who Slashed Bush Tax Cut Are Hiding Huge Spending Agendas

4/1/2003

From: Demian Brady, Pete Sepp or Maureen Tell, 703-683-5700, all of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation

ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 1 -- As Members of Congress begin to confer on legislation that will help shape the President's tax cut proposal, a study from the non-partisan National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF) today warned that some Senators who voted to scale back the tax plan may not be as concerned about federal budget deficits as they claim.

"The Senate's self-professed 'deficit hawks' who recently trimmed the President's tax cut may not be the birds of a fiscally responsible feather that taxpayers had hoped to find," said NTUF Senior Policy Analyst and study author Demian Brady. Among his findings:

-- The typical Senator who voted last week to uphold the President's proposed tax cut sponsored or cosponsored legislation in the previous Congress that would, if enacted all at once, increase federal spending by an average of $19.5 billion per year. However, Senators who voted to slash the tax cut in half (out of concern for the deficit) had an agenda that, on average, would raise spending four times higher - $89.9 billion per year. -- Over a ten-year lifespan, this amount ($89.9 billion) would exceed the size of the Bush tax plan that critics deride as "too costly." -- The ten-year, $726 billion static "cost" (which doesn't account for economic growth benefits) of the tax cut is dwarfed by the $27.8 trillion in federal spending projected to occur over the same period. In fact, the foregone revenue could be balanced out by restraining budget growth by just 2.6 percent annually.

The study is based on data from NTUF's BillTally system, which was created in 1991 to tabulate the cost or savings (based on neutral third-party estimates) of every piece of spending legislation introduced in either House of Congress during each session. BillTally then cross-indexes these figures with sponsorship records for each Member of Congress, and produces a "net agenda cost" that reflects the change in federal spending that would occur if every bill a given lawmaker supports would become law.

"For every bill to cut spending introduced in the Senate during the First Session of the last Congress, there were thirty bills to increase spending," Brady concluded. "Taxpayers shouldn't be fooled, on April Fool's Day or any other -- with so many agendas calling loudly and clearly for higher spending, the latest cries against deficits ring hollow in the Capitol."

NTUF is the non-partisan research arm of the 335,000-member National Taxpayers Union. Note: NTUF Issue Brief 144, Don't Be Fooled by the "Deficit Hawks," along with further information on BillTally, is available online at http://www.ntu.org.