Why the ‘Current Policy’ Baseline Is a Massive Gimmick That Effectively Kills the Filibuster
Imagine that you’re renting an apartment and the terms of the lease require paying your landlord $2,000 every month.
Now, imagine that the lease expires at the end of this month. Here you sit, on July 1, with no lease signed for the month of August. Congratulations, you’ve now got $2,000 extra dollars that you can spend on anything else. Take a vacation! Buy a fancy new computer! Eat 1,300 Costco hot dogs!
“Wait a minute,” you might be thinking, “where am I going to live in this hypothetical situation? Surely, I’ll have to sign a new lease that will cost somewhere around the same amount as the one I’ve been paying. I’ll need that $2,000 when I renew this lease or sign a different one.”
Ah, but that’s because you haven’t discovered the magic of “current policy” baseline budgeting, which is all the rage among Republicans who want to pass an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. Those tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year, but GOP lawmakers think they have found a way to avoid the budgetary cost of extending them. That cost is steep: about $4.6 trillion over the next 10 years, if the tax cuts are extended in full with no spending cuts to offset them. The “current policy” baseline, however, allows members of Congress to ignore that.
Using the “current policy” baseline, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Senate version of the tax bill—which could get a final vote as soon as today—will reduce the long-term deficit by about $521 billion. When evaluated in a more typical way, without that giant gimmick, the bill will add about $3.9 trillion to the deficit.
Comparing government budgets to a household is never a perfect apples-to-apples measurement. Still, that’s about the same as if you’d agreed to a new lease at the same $2,000 per month rate, but you were going to set your personal household budget on the assumption t
Article from Reason.com
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