Ron Johnson is No Fiscal Conservative

I have to confess. I am a fiscal conservative. Other than during a deep recession or national emergency, I believe that the Federal Government should not spend more money than it takes in.

Senator Ron Johnson has long claimed to be a fiscal conservative, too. However, Johnson has totally reversed himself by supporting current GOP efforts to slash federal taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich.

While we are running deficits, we have absolutely no business in drastically increasing defense spending. We should not take-on purposeless multi-billion dollar projects like the DOTUS's Great Wall. We cannot afford to waste tens of billions on political stunts like IQ45's ending of supplemental ACA payments. We cannot justify huge pay-outs to the profitable pharmaceutical and fossil-fuel industries. And most of all, we should not reduce the amount of money coming-in by enacting humongous tax cuts.

Although I reject Sen. Ron Johnson's Tea Party approach on almost every issue, I have agreed with him on one thing. I saw Johnson's budget Power Point presentation several years ago during a West Bend town hall. He made the point that the growing Federal debt is a big problem. I totally agree. I appreciate the fact that he has brought attention to this problem. However, I do not agree with his placing the blame on Social Security and Medicare. We should not gut these programs that we have paid-into in our entire working lives.

But Johnson can no longer claim to be a fiscal conservative. He is currently a big proponent of so-called tax reform. There are two things he, and all Republicans, co-mix in that term. There is tax simplification, in which many of the byzantine rules of the current tax code would be revised to make filing taxes simpler. It is hard to argue against this. Who doesn't like the idea of a tax-return the size of a postcard?

However, the GOP's main drive for "tax reform" is not simplification. That is merely a diversion. The real motivation is to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. This fiscally destructive move is being insisted on by major Republican donors. Depending on the final details, the GOP bill will add between $1.5 and $2.2 TRILLION dollars to the national debt over the next ten years.

Anyone who is concerned about deficits should be terrified of the Republican tax plan. This isn't rocket science. If you bring-in less money than you spend, then you run deficits. If you enact policies that drastically axe the amount of money coming-in, you make those deficits even larger.

However, many of the Republican politicians touting tax reform want us to believe that multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts will fund themselves. They are feeding us the lie that we will miraculously see such incredible economic growth that the government will actually see higher revenue. Variously called trickle-down economics, or voodoo economics, or bullshit, this has been shown time after time to simply not work. It didn't work in the '80's under Reagan. It didn't work in the 00's under Bush. It isn't working at the state level in the basket-case of Kansas.

Congressional Republicans put so much faith in the myth of self-funding tax cuts that they are calling on the CBO to score their tax-giveaway using fantasy numbers. They do not want the CBO to use realistic projected economic growth numbers to determine how badly the federal debt will balloon (so-called static scoring). They want the CBO to assume much higher growth rates, so that the resultant debt will not appear so cataclysmic (so-called dynamic scoring).

Like most Republicans, Ron Johnson has totally reversed his Obama-Era position that the deficit is important. He wants to run the US into ruinous debt by giving huge tax breaks to the already wealthy and to corporations enjoying record profits. During a September interview with the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, Johnson said that the tax reform he supports will lead to "a somewhat lowering of rates. From my standpoint, not even close to enough, but it's better than nothing."

Earlier this month, Johnson confessed that he was fine with being responsible for adding trillions to America's debt, "Just agree we’re going to lose money on a static scoring basis. I’m happy to live with a $2-3 trillion static loss."

So Ron Johnson is supporting what will be the largest corporate tax give-away ever. He is supporting a Republican effort to run America into a ditch of financial ruin. He is supporting policies that mortgage our children's future to give tax breaks to the one percent. He would be happy to add $3 trillion to the national debt. Fiscal conservative, my eye !