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Wednesday, July 22, 2009
10:37 AM EDT
Sandra Fabry

ATR and CFA Call on U.S. House Members to Reject Statutory PAYGO

ATR and CFA have called on Members of the U.S. House of Representatives to reject H.R. 2920,
“Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2009, which is ultimately nothing more than a rhetorical fig leaf for fiscal recklessness.

ATR may rate a vote against the bill, while the Center for Fiscal Accountability will rate a vote against it.

From ATR's vote alert:

The concept may be rhetorically appealing - after all, the concept of paying for something ‘as you go’ sounds like a common sense idea. But make no mistake, H.R.2930 is nothing more than a fig leaf to provide political cover for tax-and-spend policies, and would in fact set the stage for higher taxes being touted as the only way to avoid such across-the-board cuts in entitlement spending.

But political gimmickry doesn’t end here.  H.R. 2920, which mirrors the President’s proposal from June, assumes that existing expiring entitlement programs will continue indefinitely and as such don’t have to be paid for, while most expiring tax law will have to be paid for.  At the same time, the bill contains a loophole for some of the President’s own priorities including a few cherry-picked popular extensions of current tax law (the Death Tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax and certain other tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003). Medicare payments to physicians would also conveniently be excluded

Click here for ATR's full vote alert and here for CFA's vote alert.

Posted by Sandra Fabry on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 10:37 AM EDT
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