On today’s Opinion page in The Daily Republic, columnist David Broder said there is "less than meets the eye" to the pay-go measure passed recently by the House and hailed by Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, D-S.D.:
In the 2006 election, the Democrats took over and the first thing they did was to restore pay-go as a rule of the House and Senate. This year, Obama encouraged them to make it a law, hoping it would give him more power to enforce it.
It could do just the opposite. The bill says that at the end of the year, if Congress has spent more on new entitlements or tax cuts than it has saved, the president can roll back or sequester the excess. But the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper, in a July 14 memo warned that, as introduced, it might actually allow spending to increase — and by a staggering amount.
“In effect,” it said, “that rule would allow the Congress to enact legislation that would increase deficits by an amount in the vicinity of $3 trillion over the 2010-2019 period without triggering a sequestration.”
The reason is that the bill exempts from pay-go all the spending involved in Medicare physician payments and all the revenue dependent on estate and gift taxes, the alternative minimum tax for individuals and the administration’s plan to continue the middleincome tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.
That is not the only giant loophole in this version of pay-go. Unlike the one enacted in 1990, it is not accompanied by any multi-year cap on discretionary spending. That means the 40 percent of the budget reflected in annual appropriations bills for ongoing or new government programs does not have to be paid for.
