Orszag Is Right: Locking in Bush Tax Cuts Not Worth a $1.2 Trillion Super Committee Deal

Former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, now vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup, hit the nail on the head when he told Atlantic Media's Ron Brownstein recently, "There is virtually nothing the super committee could plausibly do that could offset the harm from making the [Bush] tax cuts permanent" because of their very large cost.

Some super committee proposals would actually have been damaging to long-term deficit reduction. The plan of Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, for example, would have set tax rates well below the Bush levels and locked them in permanently. Furthermore, it would have devoted the overwhelming bulk of the revenues from reforming tax expenditures to paying for those lower rates. The result would have been that both the large potential savings from tax reform and the potential savings from allowing some or all of the Bush tax cuts to expire would have been taken off the table for the future rounds of deficit reduction the nation will need.

While fiscal commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson and the Gang of Six called for cutting rates below the Bush levels, their plans would have raised over $2 trillion in net new revenues, and produced about $5 trillion in deficit reduction overall, relative to the current-policy baseline. By contrast, the Toomey plan would have left most of the needed deficit reduction for the future (it would have achieved, at most, $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction) and secured a scant $300 billion from revenues.

Related Posts:

• Examining Supercommittee Proposals
• History Lessons from Past Deficit-Reduction Packages
• FYI for the Supercommittee

This post originally appeared on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' blog, www.OfftheChartsBlog.org.