New GOP House rules pave the way for more tax cuts for wealthy, slashing spending #p2

from http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/12/27/931846/-New-GOP-House-rules-pave-the-way-for-more-tax-cuts-for-wealthy,-slashing-spending?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29

The incoming House GOP majority has adopted new rules that, according to Robert Greenstein and James Horney at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "clearly designed to pave the way for more deficit-increasing tax cuts in the next two years." Not just tax cuts, but sharply reduced spending.

Current House rules include a pay-as-you-go requirement that any tax cut or spending increase for a mandatory (i.e., entitlement) program must be offset by cuts in other mandatory spending or increases in other taxes, in order to avoid increasing the deficit. Current rules also bar the House from using budget "reconciliation" procedures — special rules that facilitate speedy action on specified budget legislation — to pass bills that would increase the deficit. The new rules would alter and greatly weaken these commonsense measures:

• The new rules announced December 22 would replace pay-as-you-go with a much weaker, one-sided "cut-as-you-go" rule, under which increases in mandatory spending would still have to be paid for but tax cuts would not.
• In addition, increases in mandatory spending could be offset only by reductions in other mandatory spending, not by any measure to raise revenues such as by closing unproductive special-interest tax loopholes. For example, the House would be barred from paying for continuation of a provision enacted in 2009 (and extended in the just-enacted tax compromise) that enables many minimum-wage families to receive a full, rather than a partial, Child Tax Credit by closing wasteful tax breaks for multinational corporations that shelter profits overseas. Use of such an offset would violate the new House rules because the provision expanding the Child Tax Credit for working-poor families counts as spending and hence could not be paid for by closing a tax loophole. Yet the same new rules would enable the House to expand tax loopholes for multinational corporations and wealthy investors without paying for those tax breaks at all, because any tax cut, no matter how costly or ill-advised, could now be deficit financed.
• The new rules would stand the reconciliation process on its head, by allowing the House to use reconciliation to push through bills that greatly increase deficits as long as the deficit increases result from tax cuts, while barring the use of reconciliation in the House for legislation that reduces the deficit if that legislation contains a net increase in spending (no matter how small) that is more than offset by revenue-raising provisions.

By itself, this change in the House rules governing reconciliation would have a limited effect. Reconciliation rules are most important in the Senate because they prohibit use of a filibuster to block a vote on reconciliation legislation, enabling such legislation to pass the Senate with a majority vote instead of the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster (filibusters cannot be used in the House on any legislation). This change in House rules would not affect the current Senate rule barring the use of reconciliation to pass deficit-increasing legislation. But, revising the House rules to allow use of reconciliation to push through deficit-financed tax cuts could well be the first step toward elimination of all rules restricting the use of reconciliation for that purpose. After all, the current bar on using the reconciliation process to pass budget-busting tax cuts (and budget-busting spending increases) was made part of House and Senate rules only in 2007, over GOP opposition.

As everyone outside the Village has figured out, Republicans have never truly cared about the deficit, which is one of the most frustrating aspects of the Democrats' adoption of their deficit narrative. By reinforcing the deficit hysteria which the Right will continue to use to justify shredding the safety net, the Dems made the GOP's job that much easier. And by extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest have all but insured that the resulting ballooning deficit will make those spending cuts deeper and increasingly painful. This isn't some big secret plan of the Republicans'--they've made it absolutely clear that this is their intention all along. These new rules are just the latest demonstration of that.