Dear Budget Supercommittee: It's Time To Grow Up

The Supercommittee, if rumor, speculation and common sense can be credited, now will shirk its role as political suicide bomber. The Supercommittee was created in a fit of ambiguous revulsion against the truly gargantuan, obnoxious, deficit. It got off on a macho, but false, premise:  that the path out was by mutual pain: raising taxes and cutting entitlements.

Wrong premise.  There is a way to balance the budget.  Figure out  how to get the economy growing at 4% (or even 5%) instead of its current stupefied 2% range?  Extra growth compounds fast.  Accepting stagnation — economic growth that barely keeps up with population growth — means that nobody prospers except at the expense of others.  No wonder most Americans consider the country off track.   Americans are committed to prosperity.

As economist Ike Brannon (and as has been here previously cited): “The primacy of economic growth in generating tax revenue cannot be overstated: the fastest post-war increases in tax revenue growth occurred in 1997-2000 and 2004-2007, when revenues went up by nearly 50% in each instance.  Tax rates did not go up at all during that time — the rapid increase in revenue occurred because we were in a sustained period of strong economic growth.”

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