Liberal CBPP attack against Thune Tax Extender Amendment is patently false

The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has launched an attack against Senator Thune’s GOP tax extender alternative amendment that is plainly untrue.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Senator Thune’s GOP tax extender amendment cuts taxes by $26 billion, cuts spending by over $100 billion, and reduces the deficit by $68 billion.

Senator Thune’s amendment is a step in the right direction toward reducing spending, reducing taxes and reducing the deficit. This approach is a stark contrast to the Democrats’ tax extender bill, which increases spending $126 billion, includes over $70 billion in new taxes, and increases the deficit $79 billion over the next 10 years.

CBPP claims that Senator Thune’s amendment achieves these saving by shutting down the government. This gloom and doom scenario would be scary if it were true, but it is not.

Let’s look at the facts:

CBO says the Thune amendment would result in a $3 billion cut to non-defense, non-veterans, non-stimulus outlays over the remainder of this fiscal year (July-September), trimming merely two percent from remaining agency budgets over the next three months, not 22 percent as claimed by CBPP.  CBPP disingenuously looks at the wrong metric of government spending, known as budget authority, and compares this over the whole year, not the remaining three months, to make their inaccurate and misleading claim that a government shutdown would result from this amendment.

The Thune amendment would require federal managers to trim back slightly during the final quarter of the fiscal year, when they are normally busy blowing their remaining agency budgets on unnecessary expenses so they don’t face a cut next year.

To think that federal managers can’t find $3 billion in savings out of a $652 billion annual budget is an insult to federal managers.

The other cuts in the Thune amendment are to unobligated stimulus funds, which currently stand at $55 billion and cuts in other unspent federal funds, of which there are nearly $680 billion.

As Americans now carry the burden of a $13 trillion national debt, Congress must sober up and face their responsibility to make tough decisions and get spending under control.

Raising taxes on families and small businesses, as the Democrat plan would do, would have a devastating effect across the country.

Cutting spending, reducing taxes and lowering our deficit and debt is the right approach Congress should take to deal with our economic challenges.

What America needs right now is common sense leadership, not irresponsible scare tactics.

Cross-posted from the Republican Policy Committee blog