Free Republic

President Donald Trump's new budget confirms that without corrective action, trillion-dollar deficits will be with us for years and perhaps decades to come. Trump's budget plan has many smart and urgent spending reforms. But will Congress ignore them once again? Alas, probably, but the longer we wait, the shorter the debt bomb fuse. But step one in solving this crisis is to recognize the facts about it and to dispel the pervasive mythologies about what caused this ocean of systemic borrowing and how best to deal with it. Myth 1: Trump created these deficits. No, no, no. These were the...

The good news is that there's a debate in Washington about how to make the tax code less destructive. The bad news is that lawmakers will be able to achieve much less than they otherwise could because of bad policy priorities. It's obvious that Congress and the White House are unwilling to cut or even restrain spending to pay for tax reform. Indeed, the budget resolution that passed the Senate calls for a tax reform bill that would increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion over ten years with no savings worth mentioning. As a result, there's little leeway to mix...