LAMBRO: Deficit pressure on promises

COMMENTARY:

STANFORD, Calif.

Barack Obama will likely be forced to scale back his spending plans and perhaps slow his middle-class tax cuts next year because of massive deficits from the recession and the economic bailout.

That is the prediction from top economists and budget analysts here at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who have been tracking the worsening recession. Their forecast: sharply higher government deficits from plunging revenues that will severely constrain the incoming president’s ambitious agenda.

President-elect Obama’s problem: He has exaggerated the revenue his tax increases would bring in and underestimated what his health care and other social welfare programs would cost.

“It’s a given that Obama will not be able to achieve all that was promised in light of the fiscal situation that he is walking into,” said John Cogan, a top budget adviser in previous Republican administrations.

“We’ve seen just how hard it is to maintain these pay-as-you-go rules where every additional expenditure needs to be financed with higher taxes. And Sen. Obama is going to face exactly that problem, so it will be very hard to finance the kind of change he talked about in his campaign,” said Mr. Cogan, a Hoover economic analyst and professor on public policy at Stanford University.

The weakening economy and unprecedented deficits could also impede his plans to raise taxes on wealthier Americans and give refundable tax cuts to low-to-middle-income workers, Mr. Cogan said. “I think it might delay some of his tax increases and stretch out some of the tax cuts,” he said.

Mr. Cogan figures Mr. Obama will face a budget deficit of $600 billion on the day he takes office in two months - a sea of red ink that could easily grow to $1 trillion by the end of the 2009 fiscal year.

“He needs to scale back what he’s proposed. If he tried to adopt them as proposed, they would cost much more, raise considerably less, increase the budget deficit, and accomplish less,” said Hoover economist Michael Boskin who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H. W. Bush.

Like other conservative economists at Hoover, Mr. Boskin believes higher tax rates - especially Mr. Obama’s plans to raise investment taxes on capital gains and dividends - will hurt economic growth.

“It’s rarely wise to raise taxes, but especially foolish to do it when you know you are in a deep recession,” he told me. Asked if he knew of an economic model where raising taxes in a recession had worked, Mr. Boskin said, “I don’t know of one.

“He’s got to deal first with the short-run problems of the economy and seems intent on doing so. To do anything now that might harm the economy would be economically dangerous and politically foolish,” he said.

Mr. Obama has acknowledged he may have to re-evaluate his tax and spending proposals to see if any pullback may be necessary as a result of the deepening recession and its impact on the deficit and the economy.

But throughout his campaign, he maintained all his proposals to give tax cuts to 95 percent of all taxpayers, as well as his spending plans, “are paid for,” meaning their costs would be totally offset by increased tax revenues from higher taxes on the top 5 percent of income earners.

Story Continues →