Comment & Debate
Debra J. Saunders. “Ending the Bush tax ‘cuts’ is a tax increase.” San Francisco Chronicle. August 15th, 2010: “For my part, I don’t want to hear another conservative pundit call for more tax cuts until the there’s a closure of the gap between what Washington takes in and what it promises and spends. If that day never comes, well, someone has to pay for the party. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin stands out as the rare Republican willing to challenge the Democrats’ “culture of dependency” by proposing painful cuts on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending. He, at least, is willing to tell the middle class that entitlement spending is “unsustainable.” Ryan is the adult in this room. As David Walker, head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and former U.S. controller, told The Chronicle’s Carolyn Lochhead last week, ‘If you eliminated all the Bush tax cuts, if you withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow, if you eliminated foreign aid, and if you eliminated all spending associated with congressional earmarks – the populist things – it’s about 15 percent of the problem.'”