Insight
John Adams, Barack Obama, and
Tax Policy
GORDON GRAY | DECEMBER 5, 2011
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates
of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Adams, ‘Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,’ December
1770
President Obama would be well-served to remember the “Adams Rule.”
He would be well-served to remember it before taking the podium at the White House Briefing
Room this afternoon and feigning “confusion” over Republican insistence that tax cuts be paid
for – or even complaining about a House Rules change that loosens budget enforcement on
revenue reductions.
He would best remember it before a typical attack on Republicans for supporting the Bush tax
cuts that were not offset during a time when CBO was still projecting surpluses, and it was
agreed that surplus receipts do in fact belong to taxpayers.
He would be well-served to remember that every single one of his budgets has proposed
virtually the same approach. All three of Obama’s budget include a “current policy
adjustment” to assume away the scheduled expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts under
current law. If Obama were to continue those tax policies beyond their scheduled expiration,
relative to a current law baseline, he would either have to show those extended policies as
major revenue losers, or find a way to offset them. That’s no fun, so maybe just assume they’ll
go on forever and not bother paying for them. That’s exactly what the president did. In his
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budget for FY2010, the administration includes a policy adjustment of $2,681.3 billion to
“Continue the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.” Similar adjustments were included in the FY2011 and
FY2012 budgets.
He would be well-served to remember that his PAYGO proposal to Congress did not require
extensions of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to be paid for. As stated in the administration’s
analysis of the proposal, “Section 7 establishes a temporary scoring rule for purposes of
statutory PAYGO, to adjust for the substantial deviation between ‘current policy’ and ‘current
law’ in four policy areas: Medicare’s ‘Sustainable Growth Rate’ for paying physicians under
Part B, the estate tax, the AMT, and the 2001 and 2003 income tax cuts.”
It’s one thing to complain about tax policies at a time when deficits are running $1 trillion
deficits. It’s another thing entirely to hurl partisan rocks from an evidentiary glass house. This
is the type of dissembling that does little to further progress on our nation’s budget challenges,
but is par for the course from a president that has long-since foresworn governing in favor of
campaigning.
This originally appeared in The Hill on 12/6/2011
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