View this article at The Weekly Standard

WITH LITTLE FANFARE, THE WHITE HOUSE, in the person of Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, took another step in the direction of the GOP budget last week. He allowed as how a budget package offered by conservative House Democrats — the 20-odd group that has dubbed itself the Blue Dog Coalition — might form the basis for negotiations on a final package with Republicans.

It’s an interesting adventure in Budgetville. Not that anyone paid much attention, but for a couple of hours before the Republican budget bill passed the House on Oct. 26, there actually was a serious budget debate on the floor between full-blown competing alternatives.

Continue reading →

View this article at The Weekly Standard

FOR MONTHS, REPUBLICANS on Capitol Hill complained that “their” Congressional Budget Office wasn’t behaving. The CBO had long been a COP bete noire, subject to constant accusations from the right that its supposedly independent studies were cooked for the benefit of the Democrats in charge of the House and Senate. The new Republican Congress was supposed to effect major ideological changes in the CBO, now under the management of June O’Neill. But O’Neill’s CBO has been a disappointment for many; it has refused, for example, to support claims that a cut in the capital-gains tax will actually increase the amount of tax money in government coffers.

So a sigh of relief flooded Capitol Hill last week when the CBO decided to ” score” the GOP’s Medicare reform proposals the way the House leadership wanted them scored (and needed the CBO to score them). The COP needs $ 270 billion in savings over the next seven years to balance the budget, and party leaders believe their Medicare plan does just that.

Continue reading →

The Weekly Standard

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee was among friends the evening of June 5, 1995, when he invited a small group of like-minded conservatives to his office in the Cannon building to talk taxes. One of those in attendance at Rep. Bill Archer’s soiree might have been more libertarian than the others, another more of a monetarist than a supply-sider, but everyone present agreed on the basics. No one was there to discuss raising taxes to reduce the deficit, thank you very much. Nobody wanted to figure out how government could do more for people, or how to add funds to the enforcement budget of the Internal Revenue Service in order to improve ” voluntary compliance” with the tax code. No. What was under discussion was how to change all that — the Big Picture of conservative, Republican tax reform.

Continue reading →