Bruce Bartlett
Bruce Bartlett's Latest Articles | 76
Penny-Wise/Pound-Foolish Budget-Cutting
Press reports say that Congress is about to enact a nominal spending cut of 10 percent in the U.S. Government Accountability Office budget. The mind-boggling stupidity... Read »
Why the Reagan Tax Cut Worked in 1981 and Why It Wouldn’t Work Today
Thirty years ago today, Ronald Reagan signed into law the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. It remains controversial, with Democrats blaming it for undermining... Read »
People Support Higher Taxes to Reduce the Deficit by a 2-to-1 Margin
It appears that Republicans have walked away from a historic opportunity to reduce the deficit because of their obsessive insistance that not one penny come from... Read »
Pawlenty’s Wishful Thinking
The usual right-wingers like Larry Kudlow and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page are falling all over themselves to praise Tim Pawlenty for his “plan”... Read »
Obama’s Budget Message: You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
On April 13, President Obama attempted to change the budget debate in Washington, which has been conducted entirely on Republican terms for the last two years. In... Read »
The Coburn Challenge: Cut Spending Through the Tax Code as Well as Through the Budget
One of the key reasons why the U.S. has a massive budgetary problem is a core Republican belief that no provision of the tax code that reduces revenue is unjustified... Read »
Dopiest Constitutional Amendment of All Time?
Today, all 47 Senate Republicans introduced a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. Full text available here. Presumably, this is the amendment... Read »
Norquist Vetoes Both Deficit Reduction and Tax Reform
According to a report in The Hill newspaper, Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist has received assurances from Republican leaders in Congress that... Read »
Are Republicans Squandering Their Political Capital on Ineffective Budget Cuts?
There’s a new Harris poll out today that illuminates this question. It shows that support for cutting spending is mostly confined to small programs and that... Read »
Democratic Budgetary Passivity
For several weeks now, we have all been besieged by Republican ranting and raving about the budget, how it must slashed and chopped to ribbons even if it means... Read »







