Work Boxers

Congress Cheating On Budget Rules?

by Mark on June 26th, 2008

Why is this not surprising?

Thanks to Andrew Brown from FreedomWorks, who emailed me after I expressed an interest with this post. Andrew and Adam, I hope you don’t mind - this is a short post so I’m going to re-post it almost in full;

Congress Uses Same Offset Twice to Cheat Budget Rules

“Congress is using the same “revenue offset” in two different bills to mask their combined budget impact, FreedomWorks policy analysts discovered today. The measure, which creates a new IRS database of small business transactions, is being used to offset $9.8 billion in new spending in the Senate’s Dodd-Countrywide mortgage bailout, as well as $9.8 billion in tax relief in the House AMT “patch” bill.

“Pay-as-you-go,” or Paygo, budgeting requires that new spending or tax cuts have offsetting spending cuts or revenue increases to maintain a neutral impact on the deficit. Enforcing Paygo is a self-proclaimed priority for many in Congress.

Beyond the accounting gimmicks, the new government database created by the “revenue offset” is highly controversial and is opposed by small business and privacy advocates.

FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe commented, “Trying to follow these bills is like a watching a game of Three Card Monte. This Congress can’t even keep track of the legislation that creates the latest over-reaching government database. So how can we trust it with a new database of sensitive information about nearly every eBay power seller?”

Aaah - what the hey - $9.8 Billion is nothing - right?

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